On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 03:01:03PM -0500, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
The three-clause BSD license is universally considered a free software
license and is certainly acceptable for checking into our repository.
Moreover, it's GPL-compatible. The license permits you to take any
BSD-licensed software that you possess and relicense it as GPL (or
under any other compatible license, such as "totally proprietary (plus
liability/attribution requirements for redistributors)"). You
certainly wouldn't need to rewrite anything.
That's not exactly accurate. You can't just "relicense" BSD-licensed
code with the GPL, or make it proprietary. What you *can* do is include
it in something that sorta "wraps" or incorporates the BSD-licensed code,
and license the *whole* using a different license, as long as the
original BSD-licensed code still gets distributed with its BSD license
too.
That doesn't change the fact that you don't need to relicense or rewrite
anything to use BSD-licensed code in this case.
However, it seems to include a number of trademarked, copyrighted
logos. In other words, it's not really BSD-licensed. I don't know if
the logos should be in the repo. Even if we're not going to worry
about copyright on logos (à la Firefox), I'd think that the current
extension might be a trademark violation, in that users might
reasonably think your site is part of or endorsed by Google/AOL/etc.
IANAL, of course.
This may be a very real concern and, as you point out, should be
considered and/or changed.
--
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL:
http://owl.apotheon.org ]
Perrin's Principle of Exclusion: The strength of any system is inversely
proportional to the restrictions on the power of tools allowed to the
general public by that system.