[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

Christoph Wille christophw@alphasierrapapa.com
Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:25:52 +0200


At 10:16 PM 7/13/2004, John Luke wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 15:44:30 -0400, Todd Berman <tberman@off.net> wrote:
> >         Until now, the licensing situation for MonoDevelop has been a 
> bit up in
> > the air. All of the code that originated from SharpDevelop is licensed
> > under the GPL. However, the licensing the various existing contributors
> > to MonoDevelop itself have been using is kind of up in the air.
> >
> > I am going to be explicitly using the MIT X11 license on all new code
> > that I write for MonoDevelop, and would like some input from various
> > contributors/users about mandating the MIT X11 for new code inclusion.
> > What I would like to see is everyone relicense all their code inside MD,
> > both future contributions and past contributions, to MIT X11. However, I
> > would like to get some discussion going about requiring/making this
> > change.
>
>Oh boy.  I think there are a bunch of issues in this, which in the end
>might not be worth messing with.
>
>(Insert I am not a lawyer disclaimer.)
>
>- Derivatives of the existing GPL code, cannot be re-licensed can it?
>(editing a large part of the file will still leave it as GPL only)

No, GPL cannot be changed to a less-restrictive license.

>Arguably, this could apply to the whole thing, or just per-assembly,
>or who knows for sure.  Does that meet your 'explicitly using the MIT
>X11 license on all new code' requirement?
>- Individuals copyrights on GPL code allows them to
>re-license/dual-license what they wrote

Unless it is already based on GPL-ed code, in which case relicensing is not 
an option.

>- Having multiple licenses in a project just causes confusion in my opinion

Definitely, unless you had a policy in place at the very beginning of the 
project. And "existing code has license A, code that is injected in 
existing code is license B"...

>- Anything submitted as MIT/X11 can just be put into MD as GPL, right?

See dotGNU for example who were able to reuse Mono's BCL library code.

Chris