A BSD license doesn't effect OpenACS in the slightest, as BSD is fully
GPL compatible. However, (my non-lawyer's understanding is that) as
soon as someone starts contributing GPL code to a BSD codebase, that
project
effectively becomes GPL immediately. This is the
viral nature of the GPL at work. (You could always rip out all
suspected-GPL code, or just plain revert to the original BSD code, but
as more contributions and improvements come in, that gets pretty
unpleasant pretty fast...)
So, allowing code under non-GPL Open Source licenses into the OpenACS
CVS repository is not a problem at all for OpenACS, but it
might well be considered a problem by Gustaf or others who
have written effectively independent packages or applications and
published them under a BSD license. If a package really is
independent (rather than a "derivative work" of the GPL'd OpenACS),
and its author wants it to remain under a BSD license, then minimally,
if I were the author, I'd include some license text in the code making
that very very clear. Note that the AOLserver codebase has prominent
notices top about the AOLserver license at the top of every major
source file, etc.
