[M3devel] Licenses and copyright ownership

[Hendrik Boom]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 03:11:57PM -0400, Tony Hosking wrote:
> I think GPL is inherently incompatible with the original DEC/SRC license.

You can't distribute executables linking DEC/SRC-licensed code with
GPL-d code.  It's just that GPL insists on being linked only to GPL'd code
(though I gether there are a few exceptions).

There's no problem, though, if you are the copyright holder, licensing it
with as many licenses as you wish, including the GPL and the DEC licenses,
witth working giving the user the right to modufy and redistribute under
any of these  licenses.  This is how so-called dual-licensing, a way of 
making software fit with software licensed under different licenses.

We'd probably do this with all the original Modula 3 code is we could, but 
it's not us that hold the copyright, so we can't addd more permissive 
licensing terms.

So I'd advise dual-licensing with the user's choice of the SRC 
license *or* another GPL-compatible license (such as the MIT license.  
Some find the GPL licenses too restrictive).

For more information, consult http://opensource.org

-- hendrik