[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

Todd Berman tberman@off.net
Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:19:11 -0400


On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 22:21 +0200, Christoph Wille wrote:
> At 09:59 PM 7/13/2004, you wrote:
> > > I don't know if it is possible - you could dual-license the new code
> > > GPL/MIT X11, but I think that's difficult to manage because MonoDevelop
> > > code needs to link to GPLed code somewhere ... but for independend
> > > libraries I don't see a problem.
> > >
> >
> >My understanding, and this could be flawed, is that we can insert MIT
> >X11 licensed code into a GPLed product without any issues, and it will
> >retain its MIT X11 license. Obviously the existing GPLed code from
> >SharpDevelop would stay GPLed, no one is disputing that.
> 
> You can insert MIT-licensed code in a GPLed application. But the result of 
> MIT+GPL = GPL.

Alright, exactly, thats fine.

> 
> Bottomline: unless you remove all code from #develop from MonoDevelop's 
> codebase, the result is MonoDevelop is a GPL application, even with 
> MIT-licensed contributions. Which will cause one hell of a problem for 
> people who want to reuse code but don't see immediately what was which 
> license originally.
> 

Understood, and agreed, however, we need to provide some sort of
licensing sanity thoughout the application, and I am unwilling to
mandate the GPL, and am far more interesting in seeing new code use MIT
X11, as that allows us potential greater flexibility in the future.

> Chris
> 
> 
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