Re: Ocean and the search for a Music Framework

[Jeff Teunissen]

Marco Scheurer wrote:

[snip]

> Yes, but as we found out earlier that would be a license issue, not a
> copyright issue. There could perfectly be stuff copyrighted by NeXT or
> you in a package licensed by Stanford if it was contributed by NeXT or
> you.

There seems to be some amount of misunderstanding here.

There's really no such thing as a license issue. If the permissions granted
(or more likely, if the conditions under which the permissions are granted)
under two licenses are in conflict, then it is not a "license issue", it's a
"copyright infringement". This is what we refer to as a "license
incompatibility", when a combination of works covered under the two sets of
license terms becomes an infringement of the copyright on one or both sets.
That is, the resultant Work cannot be distributed because you cannot
simultaneously satisfy all of the conditions required for distribution.

This was the reason that KDE was, for a very long time, illegal to
distribute without a special exception from the GPL (which itself became
one-way incompatible with the standard GPL itself -- that is, you couldn't
place "regular" GPLed code into a program/library that was under a "GPL plus
permission to link to Qt" license, but you could move code in the other
direction just fine).

> But since some of the files in the distribution carry a different
> license agreement than the distribution as a whole, there is some
> ambiguity about how to treat them, and I agree that there is a problem.

Well, there's that. :)

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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