Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "License compatibility" in English language version.
Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works. However, GPLv3 software cannot be included in Apache projects. The licenses are incompatible in one direction only, and it is a result of ASF's licensing philosophy and the GPLv3 authors' interpretation of copyright law.
Changing an existing license […] You can change the license on a piece of code under any of the following conditions: If you are the sole copyright holder […] If you are the sole registered copyright holder […] If you obtain the consent of all other copyright holders […] If no other copyright holder could be harmed by the change.
GPLv3: The GNU General Public License version 3 was declared a 'BY-SA–Compatible License' for version 4.0 on 8 October 2015. Note that compatibility with the GPLv3 is one-way only, which means you may license your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 4.0 materials under GPLv3, but you may not license your contributions to adaptations of GPLv3 projects under BY-SA 4.0.
The licences for distributing free or open source software (FOSS) are divided in two families: permissive and copyleft. Permissive licences (BSD, MIT, X11, Apache, Zope) are generally compatible and interoperable with most other licences, tolerating to merge, combine or improve the covered code and to re-distribute it under many licences (including non-free or proprietary).
Remember that the GPL requires anything that statically links to any code under the GPL also be placed under the GPL.
Licences used in FreeCAD - FreeCAD uses two different licenses, one for the application itself, and one for the documentation: Lesser General Public Licence, version 2 or superior (LGPL2+) […] Open Publication Licence
Someone who works with many lawyers on free software copyright issues later told me that it is not necessary to get permission from 100% of the copyright holders. It would suffice if there was permission from the copyright holders of 95% of the source code and no objections from the holders of the other 5%. This, I'm told, is how Mozilla was able to re-license to the GPL in 2003 despite years of community contributions.
tl;dr: The current license prevents us from using certain nice and (cost-)free libraries / frameworks, so we want to change it. The new license (MPL) would be strictly more free than the old one, and is the same one that's also used by Firefox.
Our consensus was that this package appears to violate the spirit of the GPL at the minimum, and may cause legal problems. Judges often interpret documents as they're intended to read, hacks to comply with the letter but not the intent are not looked upon fondly. This may be a hard thing for technical folks to accept, but in legal cases, one usually isn't dealing with technical people. As such, this package has been rejected.
What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication […] and the semantics of the communication […]. If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program. […]
'Use a library' means […] linking […].
What the above analysis shows is that even though we presumed combination of GPLv2 and CDDL works to be a technical violation, there's no way actually to prosecute such a violation because we can't develop a convincing theory of harm resulting. Because this makes it impossible to take the case to court, effectively it must be concluded that the combination of GPLv2 and CDDL, provided you're following a GPLv2 compliance regime for all the code, is allowable.
Viral property stimulates proliferation of licenses and contributes to the 'GPL-enforced nightmare' -- a situation when many other licenses are logically incompatible with the GPL and make life unnecessary difficult for developers working in the Linux environment (KDE is a good example here, Python is a less known example).
The GPL places additional restrictions on the code, and therefore is incompatible. You can combine APSL, MPL, CDDL, Apache, and BSD-licensed code in the same project easily, but you can only combine one of these with GPLv2 code. Even the Free Software Foundation can't manage to get it right. Version 3 of the LGPL, for example, is incompatible with version 2 of the GPL. This has caused a problem recently for a few GNU library projects that wanted to move to LGPLv3 but were used by other projects that were GPLv2-only.
Microsoft launches new Android suit, Linus Torvalds' take on Linux kernel headers and Android
The only one of any note that I'd like to point out directly is the clarification in the COPYING file, making it clear that it's only _that_particular version of the GPL that is valid for the kernel. This should not come as any surprise, as that's the same license that has been there since 0.12 or so, but I thought I'd make that explicit
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
GPLv3 broke 'the' GPL into incompatible forks that can't share code.
[…] the unfortunate situation with support for DWG files in free CAD software via LibreDWG. We feel, by now it ought to be closed. We have the final answer from FSF. […] 'We are not going to change the license.'
Some time ago mozilla.org announced its intent to seek re-licensing of Mozilla code under a new licensing scheme that would address perceived incompatibilities of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Permissive licensing simplifies things One reason the business world, and more and more developers […], favor permissive licenses is in the simplicity of reuse. The license usually only pertains to the source code that is licensed and makes no attempt to infer any conditions upon any other component, and because of this there is no need to define what constitutes a derived work. I have also never seen a license compatibility chart for permissive licenses; it seems that they are all compatible.
In der Praxis ist stark unwritten, ob in Kernel module as 'derivative work' retracted warden muss. Die Auseinandersetzungen um Binär-Treiber für Linux warden it Heftiest geführt. Man word world night für sämtliche Kernel module in einheitliche Antwort find können: Wann in Kernel module von Linux »abgeleitet« ist, hängt stark von der Technische Umsetzung ab und Richter sick each den on dark leg ten Kriterien. […] Es exist even alluding much Kernelmodule, die älter and as Linux, two das Dateisystem AFS. Dort light es Auf der Hand, dass sie as functional eigenständig Anzu then send, da sie gear night »für Linux« GE Chr Eben sein können.
{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)The GPL and license compatibility - Because the primary goal of the GPL's authors is the promotion of free software, they deliberately crafted the license to make it impossible to mix GPLed code into proprietary programs. […] Any derivative work—that is, any work containing a nontrivial amount of GPLed code—must itself be distributed under the GPL. No additional restrictions may be placed on the redistribution of either the original work or a derivative work.
Ultimately, various Courts in the world will have to rule on the more general question of Linux combinations. The conservancy is committed to working towards achieving clarity on these questions in the long term. That work began in earnest last year with the VMware lawsuit, and our work in this area will continue indefinitely, as resources permit. We must do so, because, too often, companies are complacent about compliance. While we and other community-driven organisations have historically avoided lawsuits at any cost in the past, the absence of litigation on these questions caused many companies to treat the GPL as a weaker copyleft than it actually is. […] Conservancy (as a Linux copyright holder ourselves),[citation needed] along with the members of our coalition in the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, all agree that Canonical and others infringe Linux copyrights when they distribute zfs.ko.
In 2001, VLC was released under the OSI-approved GNU General Public version 2, with the commonly-offered option to use 'any later version' thereof (though there was not any such later version at the time). Following the release by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) of the new version 3 of its GNU General Public License (GPL) on the 29th of June 2007, contributors to the VLC media player, and other software projects hosted at videolan.org, debated the possibility of updating the licensing terms for future version of the VLC media player and other hosted projects, to version 3 of the GPL. […] There is strong concern that these new additional requirements might not match the industrial and economic reality of our time, especially in the market of consumer electronics. It is our belief that changing our licensing terms to GPL version 3 would currently not be in the best interest of our community as a whole. Consequently, we plan to keep distributing future versions of VLC media player under the terms of the GPL version 2. […] we will continue to distribute the VLC media player source code under GPL 'version 2 or any later version' until further notice.
Viral property stimulates proliferation of licenses and contributes to the 'GPL-enforced nightmare' -- a situation when many other licenses are logically incompatible with the GPL and make life unnecessary difficult for developers working in the Linux environment (KDE is a good example here, Python is a less known example).
The licences for distributing free or open source software (FOSS) are divided in two families: permissive and copyleft. Permissive licences (BSD, MIT, X11, Apache, Zope) are generally compatible and interoperable with most other licences, tolerating to merge, combine or improve the covered code and to re-distribute it under many licences (including non-free or proprietary).
Our consensus was that this package appears to violate the spirit of the GPL at the minimum, and may cause legal problems. Judges often interpret documents as they're intended to read, hacks to comply with the letter but not the intent are not looked upon fondly. This may be a hard thing for technical folks to accept, but in legal cases, one usually isn't dealing with technical people. As such, this package has been rejected.
In der Praxis ist stark unwritten, ob in Kernel module as 'derivative work' retracted warden muss. Die Auseinandersetzungen um Binär-Treiber für Linux warden it Heftiest geführt. Man word world night für sämtliche Kernel module in einheitliche Antwort find können: Wann in Kernel module von Linux »abgeleitet« ist, hängt stark von der Technische Umsetzung ab und Richter sick each den on dark leg ten Kriterien. […] Es exist even alluding much Kernelmodule, die älter and as Linux, two das Dateisystem AFS. Dort light es Auf der Hand, dass sie as functional eigenständig Anzu then send, da sie gear night »für Linux« GE Chr Eben sein können.
{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)Some time ago mozilla.org announced its intent to seek re-licensing of Mozilla code under a new licensing scheme that would address perceived incompatibilities of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
[…] the unfortunate situation with support for DWG files in free CAD software via LibreDWG. We feel, by now it ought to be closed. We have the final answer from FSF. […] 'We are not going to change the license.'
Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge.
With the Beta 4 release, the Ogg Vorbis libraries have moved to the BSD license. The change from LGPL to BSD was made to enable the use of Ogg Vorbis in all forms of software and hardware. Jack Moffitt says, 'We are changing the license in response to feedback from many parties. It has become clear to us that adoption of Ogg Vorbis will be accelerated even further by the use of a less restrictive license that is friendlier toward proprietary software and hardware systems. We want everyone to be able to use Ogg Vorbis.'
Upstream ZoL project [3] holds the view that in this case the combination of the two in the same binary would create a derived work, so this is not acceptable for redistribution. We accept the interpretation that this last case is not acceptable for redistribution. Therefore our package does not (and never will) ship or facilitate building a custom kernel where the ZoL ZFS driver is built-in in a monolithic binary, instead of built as an independent dynamic LKM.