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.