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You can't fork a BSD project and relicense it as GPL unless you are the copyright owner. "Route around GPL" is the tendency to avoid GPL license on new project
by crististm 13y ago
You can't fork a BSD project and relicense it as GPL unless you are the copyright owner.
"Route around GPL" is the tendency to avoid GPL license on new projects (or to change the license on existing projects - see VLC and jquery). Since project owners are free to do that anyway, the question is why is the BSD license trumpeted as a feature of the product?
Let's take the example of LLVM: there is no problem using GCC on MACs since GCC itself can be used to build proprietary systems. However, LLVM is promoted as "this is your dream compiler - fast, feature full and free from GPL restrictions".
- wbhart 13y agoI don't understand the comment about forking. Sure, you can't take my files and change the license on them. But you can take any and all of my files as is, incorporate them into your own GPL project. That's effective the same thing as now the project itself must be distributed under the terms of the GPL. So long as you don't violate the terms of the BSD license, you are free to do what you want. Going the other way is not possible. (Of course when I say BSD license I mean modified-BSD, not the original 4-term license. We don't use that of course.)