Re: News on MS opening their binary document specs

On Sunday 20 January 2008, Matija Šuklje wrote:
> Dne nedelja 20. januarja 2008 je Ariya Hidayat napisal(a):
> > You mentioned BSD to GPL relicense. Would BSD to LGPL relicense be
> > legally possible as well?
>
> Ariya,
>
> As far as I know, there are two big licenses — namely MIT and BSD — which
> you can safely relicense to *anything* at all. Including, of course LGPL.
>
> In (even) short(er) BSD means: "use this code as you will, but don't sue me
> if it crashes".
>
> And that is exactly why (L)GPL is to be used as soon as possible for any
> derivative work based on BSD or MIT, because it means that anyone (even MS,
> and they've done it before) can just copy-paste the code into its own and
> distribute and develop it further behind closed doors and are not obliged
> to publicly release the source of the code changes or even the original
> code itself.

I would hope that if there is really a relicense needed that LGPL and not GPL 
is used since else we would buy out our ideals by taking something that was 
free and turning it into something that isn't free any longer (for those that 
did provide it) aka can't be used any longer by them. Guess with such an 
action we wouldn't differ that much from MS or anybody else. We even would be 
more evil since there would be no real reason behind it beside denying those 
that grant us freedom to profit from our work based on "there" work.

Anyway, the intention of that reply is only to outline that there are also 
drawbacks on such kind of actions and that LGPL would at least still allow 
non-GPL projects to profit from it too while still protecting the own work. 
Very useful for libraries like e.g. such a filter.
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