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Re: Non-gcc releases


Thomas Heller wrote:


Hm, IANAL, but I don't think it would be illegal (or immoral) to rip libffi from the gcc cvs, remove the GPL'd files from it (there are some in the testsuite, for example), and upload it to somewhere else, leaving it under the original redhet license. Am I wrong believing this?

Uh, IANAL either. But modifying a GPLd work doesn't give you the right to distribute it under another license, as far as I can tell. I do get the 'can't you distrubute kaffe under another license' question ocassionally, and here's what I've come up so far:


What you can do, is to take some non-GPL upstream, and apply all the non-GPL-d patches to it, and then release that.

Now how you make sure that the patches are not covered by the GPL is a whole another set of land-mines, and I doubt there is a legally safe way other than to ask everyone who contributed to libffi to license their contributions to you under the non-GPL license. As soon as GPLd works enter the fray, it gets really funny, since the linking clauses in GPL make pretty much everything that touches the GPLd code GPLd, too. So the patches to code that's indirectly touching GPLd code would not only need to be licensed to you under non-GPL, you'd also have to get the GPLd code licensed to you under non-GPL, and all the code in between the two. And so on, until it gets arbitrarily complicated. That's the way the GPL was meant to be, anyway. :)

In other words, forget about relicensing, unless you're the copyright holder :) Which, in my opinion, shows that it'd be nice if the libffi copyrights were with a single, trusted, entity, i.e. FSF.

On a side note: With kaffe, relicensing would be pretty much impossible now, since there is no such single copyright holding entity. I can only estimate how much hard work it is to get everyone who contributed to a project tracked down, and get their written consent to hand over copyright for a rather 'small' project like libffi. But I bet it's a lot. :)

cheers,
dalibor topic


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