[PD-ot] Re: [PD] PiDiP's legal status

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Wed Jan 18 10:11:35 CET 2006


On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Because of the rules of the GPL, there was never a point were PiDiP
> wasn't available under the GNU GPL.  The BSD license with the added
> clause can not override the original GNU GPL.  It can be offered as an
> alternate license to the GNU GPL as long as the complete sources are
> available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

It's not provided as an alternate license because nowhere it is stated
that the user may pick one of several licenses.

The program has to be clearly licensed under an umbrella license that
lists all the alternatives. Not doing so and just providing two licenses
is potentially a contradiction, which can be alleviated by assuming that
both licenses apply at once, but then clause 4 of GPL forbids additional
clauses under penalty of termination of license, therefore, this
particular combination of licenses cancels itself and so PiDiP's license
is the default "All Rights Reserved" with about a dozen authors involved
in several different teams.

 _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada




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