[Mailman-Developers] mailman / archive-ui / licensing questions

[David Jeske]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>wrote:

> I would say you should try to retain copyright, and have the Mailman
> project distribute it with the S-BSD license under the "mere
> aggregation" clause of the GPL.


This agrees with my view of the situation as well. Which leads to the
question, is the above approach interesting/viable for Mailman-team?
(assuming the code does something awesome that people want)

That's not the way copyright works, though.  It certainly is possible
> to assert GPL (or any other) restrictions on given *copies* of
> permissively-licensed code.


What they mean is that it is Borg-able.  You can assimilate S-BSD
> code into a GPL project, and that copy is distributed under the GPL.
>

My response here is just academic license-logic evaluation for
entertainment purposes...

I know you can "claim" to assert GPL restrictions on copies of S-BSD
code. I just don't understand how it could ever be enforced.

Any changes made post "assimilation" would be in a state of confusion WRT
GPL-restrictability. Even FSF-copyright assignment for those changes isn't
sufficient to prove that the initial developer never gave a less-restricted
version of his changes out directly to the S-BSD pre-assimilation project
under their license. You're back to requiring afadavits from all authors
stating they never did so, or perhaps challenging projects to produce
checkin-logs to show who saw the change first.

...the thought experiment is merely academic though. I don't want my code
in the hands of folks that can even "claim" to restrict it with the GPL..
which means FSF-assignment is not something I'm willing to do for my stuff.