Hi all,
Joe asked for clarification on this matter and hence I bring it to our list.
Joe has taken over dan-eng development successfully and already cleaned up and
extended this dictionary substantially. In his last change, I found the
following:
- <p>Available under the terms of the <ref
target="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html";>GNU General Public License
ver. 3.0 and any later version</ref>.</p>
+ <p>Available under the terms of the <ref
target="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html";>GNU General Public License
ver. 3.0 and any later version</ref> and all changes after version 0.3 (0.3
included) is also released under Text of Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and any later version (dual
license).</p>
To summarise Joe's view, the dual-licencing is fine because the mentioned
licence is compatible with the GPL. See below this email for an excerpt. While
it is true that works can be dual licenced, there are two things which have to
be kept in mind
1. The dual licence must be known upfront, that is at the beginning of the work
so that authors are aware of both licences.
2. If a 2nd licence shall be added, all previous authors have to give their
consent. This is required because otherwise people could just use an
arbitrary GPL/LGPL program, apply changes, relicence the changes under a
less restrictive licence and are fine. LGPL and GPL are simply too strict
here and do not allow this particular case, except for all authors agreeing.
This might sound like nitpicking but I think we really should be careful about
licences. I will not able to upload the dictionary to Debian with the current
licence change.
Thanks all
Sebastian
===
Joe wrote:
GPL is copyleft, meaning you have to distrubute any derivative works of the
original also under the GPL. If you use a GPL library in your project, that
creates a derivative work of the library, and your entire project has to be
licensed under the GPL.
One exception: if it's the LGPL (Lesser/Linking GPL) then dynamically linking
the library does not create a derivative and you're free to license how you
want.
One caveat: you can also license your work under annother license. As long as
people can get it under GPL, that satisfies the GPL requirements, and you can
dual-license with MIT, for example. People can choose which license to follow.
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