Forum OpenACS Development: Re: A Wiki Page per Package?

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
XoWIKI is in HEAD (or was when I committed it), but due to probable license issues (as it is not GPL but BSD (I think...)) Gustaf decided not to put it there and I (accidently) uploaded it as I did not see the license statement in the code and assumed it was GPL.

Either way it is Gustaf's call to make.

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Posted by Joe Cooper on
XoWIKI is in HEAD (or was when I committed it), but due to probable license issues (as it is not GPL but BSD (I think...)) Gustaf decided not to put it there and I (accidently) uploaded it as I did not see the license statement in the code and assumed it was GPL.

I saw the thread on this, and I thought it had been resolved so I didn't bother to say anything. But I'll chime in to clarify now:

BSD is wholly GPL-compatible, unless it has the advertising clause. One can slurp a BSD package into a GPL package without license concerns. The reverse is not true, however...unless one is willing to accept a license upgrade from BSD to the stricter GPL for the whole project. GPL is viral, BSD is not.

In short, BSD is an extremely liberal license, barely above public domain. So liberal that relicensing BSD code under a different license is wholly permissible (again, with the possible exception of the advertising clause, which can either be forgiven by the copyright holder, or it can be special-cased in the GPL project...this has been done in some places in the Linux kernel).

There are a lot of thorns in the plethora of licenses out in the wild, but BSD is pretty much wholly thorn free. The only question you need to ask is whether there is an advertising clause, and if not, you're free to pull it into anything you like, including proprietary non-Open products. This is exactly the reason many folks prefer BSD. I'm not one of them, but I understand their reasons.

You've done no wrong in importing BSD code into OpenACS, Malte.