[TUHS] Re: SCO's "evidence" (was: RIP Darl McBride former CEO of SCO)

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Thu, Nov 7, 2024 at 4:03 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 07, 2024 at 01:59:18PM -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> >
> > Somebody here likened this to the GPL, in the sense that if you add
> > anything to a GPL-licensed thing, the whole thing, including your stuff,
> is
> > covered by the GPL. I don't know enough about the GPL to say for sure
> that
> > that's actually how the GPL works.
>
> Well, it is certainly possible to insert dual-licensed code --- for
> exaple, there are some WiFi drivers which are dual-licensed under the
> BSD and GPL licenses, and the file is very clearly marked as being
> dual licensed.  This means that if someone contributes changes to the
> file, their are agreeing that their changes are also similarly
> dual-licensed --- and so those changes can be take and merged into a
> driver that might be part of (for example) FreeBSD.
>
> Now, if you take code which was originally under a weak FOSS license which
> is GPL compatible, and you don't mark it as dual licensed when you
> incorporate it into a GPL project, the presumption is that the code in
> the GPL project is GPL licensed.  So if there are changes made to that
> codebase as it exists in the GPL code bases, those changes are
> presumed to be GPL-licened, and hence can't be contributed back to the
> BSD-licensed code base.
>
> This caused a certain aount of unhappiness by BSD partisans, since
> they viewed it unfair the GPL project to take code from the BSD
> project, but they couldn't do the reverse.  There were two responses
> to this.
>
> The first was, "well, if you were OK with a weak free software
> license, and you were presumably happy allowing NetAPP or Sun to take
> your code and make $$$ off of it, why are you whining about a GPL
> project doing essentilly the same thing as NetAPP or Sun?  In both
> cases, you aren't getting improveents back from your code.  Deal with
> it."
>

Part of the problem, though, in some of these cases was that the entire
license was removed, rather than the GPL being just added...  The BSDL
is quite permissive, true, but not quite that permissive...


> The second resonse was to work with the BSD folks, and to maintain
> certain drivers as dual-licensed, as described earlier.
>

Which is always a better choice...


> In some other, related cases, such as Linux's /dev/random driver, or
> the UUID library in userspace, I *wanted* the code to get used in as
> may places as possible, and so I was **happy** that Apple adopted my
> UUID library in MacOS, something that was only possible because I had
> dual-licensed the UUID library under the GPL and BSD-style license
> from the get-go.  As far as I know no took the /dev/random driver from
> Linux and put in their BSD-style licensed OS.  But it certainly worked
> as-designed in the case of the UUID library.  (Not that it was a huge
> amount of code, but I was passionate about promulgating the use of
> UUID's as far and as wide as possible.)
>

That's a good outcome...

Warner


> Cheers,
>
>                                         - Ted
>

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