Re: Non-gcc releases

[Thomas Heller <theller at python dot net>]

Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> writes:

> Thomas Heller wrote:
>
>> Hm, IANAL, but I don't think it would be illegal (or immoral) to rip
>> libffi from the gcc cvs, remove the GPL'd files from it (there are some
>> in the testsuite, for example), and upload it to somewhere else, leaving
>> it under the original redhet license.  Am I wrong believing this?
>
> Uh, IANAL either. But modifying a GPLd work doesn't give you the right
> to distribute it under another license, as far as I can tell.

That's for sure, of course.  But does the fact that libffi sits in the
gcc repository make it GPL?  I don't think so.

> I do get the 'can't you distrubute kaffe under another license'
> question ocassionally, and here's what I've come up so far:
>
> What you can do, is to take some non-GPL upstream, and apply all the
> non-GPL-d patches to it, and then release that.

Again the question: are the applied patches covered by the GPL?  The
LICENSE file in the libffi directory still contains the redhat license.

> Now how you make sure that the patches are not covered by the GPL is a
> whole another set of land-mines, and I doubt there is a legally safe
> way other than to ask everyone who contributed to libffi to license
> their contributions to you under the non-GPL license. As soon as GPLd
> works enter the fray, it gets really funny, since the linking clauses
> in GPL make pretty much everything that touches the GPLd code GPLd,
> too. So the patches to code that's indirectly touching GPLd code would
> not only need to be licensed to you under non-GPL, you'd also have to
> get the GPLd code licensed to you under non-GPL, and all the code in
> between the two. And so on, until it gets arbitrarily
> complicated. That's the way the GPL was meant to be, anyway. :)
>
> In other words, forget about relicensing, unless you're the copyright
> holder :) Which, in my opinion, shows that it'd be nice if the libffi
> copyrights were with a single, trusted, entity, i.e. FSF.

I do not care about the copyright holder, I only care about licensing.
And I want a BSD-like license, GPL is definitely not acceptable to me.

> On a side note: With kaffe, relicensing would be pretty much
> impossible now, since there is no such single copyright holding
> entity. I can only estimate how much hard work it is to get everyone
> who contributed to a project tracked down, and get their written
> consent to hand over copyright for a rather 'small' project like
> libffi. But I bet it's a lot. :)
>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic

Sigh.  And I only wanted to use some 'free' sofware, and improve it with
my work ...

Thomas