[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

[Christoph Wille]

At 10:26 PM 7/13/2004, you wrote:
>On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 22:28 +0200, Christoph Wille wrote:
> > At 10:19 PM 7/13/2004, Todd Berman wrote:
> > > > 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.
> >
> > I see one problem, though: you are using our core. Everything is built on
> > top of that. So... how can anyone write non-GPL code on top of the 
> GPL-ed core?
>
>The code would be X11 licensed, however the product would remain under
>the GPL license, unless a day came that all the code had been rewritten
>(which, trust me, is *not* going to happen).

I have the sinking feeling this is going nowhere - you cannot license 
something that links against GPL code under any other license but GPL. Only 
if it had no references to GPL-ed code in the first place (on submitting by 
contributor) and on acceptance you'd change it to link against the GPL'ed code.

Example 1: you have a MIT-licensed snippet of a search algorithm and tweak 
it so it is a search strategy (needs to implement a few interfaces etc) 
that works with #develop. Fine.

Example 2: someone writes a search strategy specifically for #develop which 
means it links against GPL'ed code in the first place. No way you can 
license that new search strategy MIT.

Chris