Subject: Re: Copyright of Ispell Modifications (take two)
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Fri Jul 06 2001 - 20:48:19 CDT
On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 05:48:30PM -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> I'm glad Geoff has explicitly confirmed that we can use his code, but I see
> *nothing* in the license we got from Geoff which allows us to change the
> license on any of his files.
Well, you aren't allowed to change his license. But you are completely
free to on *derivitive works*, like ours. I'm presently trying to
figure out why exactly this is legal under the BSD license, but the
consensus is definately that it is allowed. I think it's because the
license is worded like this:
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
... and relicensing is never disallowed by any of the conditions.
> Even if we could relicense our changes in some other way, there have been a
> *number* of other significant contributors to our heavily-hacked fork of the
> ispell code. This has been obscured by the fact that whoever moved the code
> from other/spell to other/spell/xp wasn't able to preserve the earlier CVS
> history.
That's why it's better to keep it under new-style BSD. But to be
pedantic we would still need permission from all of those contributors
since they modified it when it had the advertising clause at the top.
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