On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > > > >> > "as a whole" means generally BUT allowing for exceptions. >> >> OK, great. That clears it up then. > > Maybe this helps: > > The BSD license does not permit to relicense the code, so you cannot put BSD > code under the GPL. Yes, if you mean what is described here as 'the original 4-clause' license, or BSD-old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses > The BSD license permits to mix a source file under BSD license with some lines > under a different license if you document this. But this is not done in all > cases I am aware of. But you can't add the 'advertising requirement' of the 4-clause BSD to something with a GPL component because additional restrictions are prohibited. > Up to now, nobody could explain me how a mixture of GPL and BSD can be legal as > this would require (when following the GPL) to relicense the BSD code under GPL > in order to make the whole be under GPL. > > In other words, if you can legally combine BSD code with GPL code, you can do > with GPL and CDDL as well. You can't do either if you are talking about the BSD-old license (which also isn't accepted as open source by the OSI). Fortunately, the owners of the original/official BSD were nice guys and removed the GPL incompatible clause, with the Revised BSD License being recognized as both open source and GPL-compatible. But that hasn't - and probably can't - happen with CDDL, so the only working option is dual licensing. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com