[TriLUG] I have some sticky licensing questions

William Sutton william at trilug.org
Fri Jul 5 13:09:41 EDT 2013


Ask your favorite IP lawyer?

Me, personally, I'd release my code with a BSD license and let them do 
whatever they want (or nothing at all) with it.

William Sutton

On Fri, 5 Jul 2013, Steve Litt wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm currently writing a standalone Python program that takes the output
> of the eLyXer LyX to HTML converter, makes it suitable to make an ePub
> ebook file, and produces the table of contents (toc.ncx).
>
> LyX is licensed GPL2 or later. eLyXer is licensed GPL3 or later. I
> dislike GPL3 (too copyleft and restrictive for my taste), and I would
> never allow a license based on some future license version. What if
> somehow Larry Ellison buys the FSF someday?
>
> I'm pretty sure I can license my program any way I want and have it
> operate on eLyXer produced HTML files. But one of the guys from the LyX
> crew felt that in the long run, it might be better for me to
> incorporate my code into LyX or eLyXer. And I dislike GPL3.
>
> Here are some questions:
>
> If I licensed it MIT, could they legally take it, modify it slightly,
> re-license the derivative work GPL3 or later (eeeewwwww), and solve the
> problem without *my* licensing it that way? That would certainly be one
> way.
>
> Could I dual-license it GPL2 and GPL3 or MIT and GPL3 or MIT and GPL2
> and GPL3, and would that allow them to incorporate it into a program
> that's GPL 3 or later?
>
> Any other ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
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