[Discuss-gnuradio] Re: forced GPL in CGRAN? gr-ucla code in BBN repo not GPL?

[Greg Troxel]

  [Discussion about gr-ucla's BSD license and GPLv3 compatibility.]

  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
  http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html

I have looked at these.

UCLA has placed code under a 3-clause BSD licenes.  As far as I
understand, that's a "GPL compatible non-copyleft free software license"
under the FSF taxonomy, and there's no problem linking that code with
GPLv3 code.  See
  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
and search for "modified BSD licenes".

  Anything that includes any gr_*.h header directly or indirectly is
  going to be a "work based on the earlier work" and must be licensed
  under the GPL.

This seems to be the FSF's interpretation; I'm not the least bit sure
that's settled copyright law.  One can't use text in the GPL to decide
what meets the derived work test under copyright law.  Including a
header and calling functions does not in my view make the source file a
derived work, but IANAL.

If one distributes a combined work -- and none of Thomas, UCLA, or BBN
have done so, to my knowledge -- then in order to have permission to
redistribute the GR parts, the distributor has to be able to grant
permission to copy the entire source under GPL.  The BSD license grants
adequate permission to do that, which is why it's considered
GPL-compatible, so there's no issue doing that.

But, just because someone distributes the code under the GPL doesn't
mean others can't go back to the original BSD-licensed code and copy it
under those terms.

Stepping way back from law, DARPA funded research and wanted the results
to be broadly available, under a BSD license rather than GPL, in order
to ease tech transfer (in ways the FSF objects to, by enabling
proprietary derivative works).  BBN's GNU Radio work is assigned and
hence GPL, because we tried to meet each community on its own terms.
UCLA has a more permissive license, and I think that's fine too.  The
important thing is that others in the community have the ability to
modify, improve, and redistribute the code, and the BSD license
certainly permits that.

So I don't think there is actually any problem at all.

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