Re: Mathworks-hosted GPL'd software

[Judd Storrs]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 2:13 AM, Jaroslav Hajek <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> BSD is not a copyleft license, so it's allowed to add restrictions
> like this, isn't it? I agree this was probably a strong reason to get
> rid of copyleft licenses, which would not allow them to do this.
>

I very, very much doubt they are allowed to modify the licenses at all.

At the risk of getting the honourable RMS to jump on me again with his
samurai sword, the BSD community (and I'm not sure why but for some
reason OpenBSD comes to mind) can become quite hostile upon
discovering that someone is distributing trivially modified
BSD-licensed source with substituted, modified or deleted copyright
headers.

The BSD reasoning is as follows: If changes do not rise to the level
of creating a derived work you have no copyright claim to the modified
file and you have no authority to modify the licensing at all. Note
well that the GPL goes to somewhat great lengths to explicitly define
what is considered a derived work. The BSD does not.

What is considered a derived work of a BSD-licensed file relies on
case law (i.e. legal tradition and guestimation by lawyers) which is
really pretty dangerous because courts can and do change their minds
for strange and mysterious reasons. It's much better to have things
spelled out as is the case in the GPL. The BSD understanding of what
constitutes a derived work resulted from a very lengthy and ugly US
lawsuit with AT&T that resulted in separating the UNIX code base into
"BSD-owned" and "AT&T-owned" and "jointly-owned" contributions. The
rules they used were very possibly specific to US court law and even
possibly to that specific court room ;)

In any case, merely adding an additional restriction to the license
clearly does not result in a derived work except in bizzaro world.
Since they can't modify them, the best Mathworks can hope do is
attempt to make it difficult to access to the files if they are
interested in being hostile. Once anyone obtains BSD-licensed source
code through whatever means, the copyright holder has granted you
permission to use and redistribute it according to the terms of the
BSD license.


--judd