Re: Question About GNU General Public License

[Alexander Terekhov]

Arnoud Engelfriet wrote:
[...]
> If you combine GPL and BSD licensed code in such a way as to create
> a derivative work (let's not debate how), 

Call it a compilation and I won't debate.

>                                           then the resulting work
> is yours and can be licensed any way you want - provided you have
> permission from the copyright holders of the code you used. The
> BSD licensor doesn't mind, but the GPL licensor insists that you
> may only distribute your derivative work if you do so under GPL.

The GPL [as long as it's a mere copyright license] can't prevent 
me from creating and distributing compilations (as long as a can 
copy and own those copies). And even if the GPL would be enforcable 
contract... things like copyright misuse would block any attempts 
to extract rights to the unrelated/nonderivative works. (silly 
"don't like it, don't use it" argument won't fly in court, I'm 
sure... otherwise there would be neither doctrine of patent misuse 
nor doctrine of copyright misuse.)

> 
> Hence, you can only distribute the resulting work under GPL terms.
> Of course the BSD part itself remains BSD, but as long as it's
> distributed as part of the derivative work, all distributors must
> comply with the GPL terms for the BSD part.

Distributors must comply with the GPL terms for the GPL'ed part 
(including derivatives -- modified code and things like that) only.

regards,
alexander.