Re: Bad choice of license in BzrForEmacsDevs

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> In addition, I wonder about the other pages in that wiki have a
>>> similar license.  Are there programs in the wiki which are licensed
>>> this way, allowing GPLv2 and not GPLv3?
>>> That would be a bad problem.  Can someone tell me if there are any?
>> There might be some, but if they rely on Emacs-23 features, such a
>> license would be illegal, AFAIK.
> Not really.  It would just be impractical since distributing this as
> part of an Emacs 23 distribution would not be feasible.  You can of
> course offer any code you wrote yourself under any license you feel fit.

This is a murky area, but the fact that the code can only run together
with GPLv3 code might imply that it is illegal to distribute it under
an incompatible license, even if it's distributed separately.

The reason for it might be the same as the reason why it wouldn't be
legal to distribute "forward only, ed-style patch" with an incompatible
license, even though none of the GPLv3 code appears in the patch.

IIRC this has never been tested in court, but convinced a company to
write the fgmp library so as to be able to distribute a program that
used libgmp but wasn't compatible with its license.


        Stefan