Originally posted by deanjo
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What they can do, and why they don't do is - to take code, read it and chinese-wall it into proprietary. Neither GPL, nor (obviously) BSD prevent it.
Patents may prevent it, but GPL issues a patent grant. Regarding BSD, I am not sure (below this post) - its seems double edged. One edge will hurt anarchy, other(wise) - proprietary. But why the proprietary still dislike GPL, is because they can't feed continuously, by just merging own changes. GPL means high cost to them (with own development being of highest cost ofc).
Originally posted by deanjo
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But outside of US, in Russia for example, BSD is not legal. Rearrangements similar to this one are required, with "original BSD" playing a sublicense (invalidated) role here - this license requires payment however.
GPL had had hard time to define its legality due to requirement of owner, licensee, etc, but it worked out.
Originally posted by zester
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Originally posted by zester
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So while source to interface of certain instance may be provided, no right to actually use the approach is granted.
In the meaning, that the licensed code represents an implementation, but no right to use the implementation (or any other modification of it ) is given.
ClearBSD license even explicitly states that.
For example, anyone using the formats, frameworks and libraries above are under threat of patent attack from their developers(more precisely - copyright owners).
When Google has licensed WebM, it initally published it under new license that combined both rights, but because it become rather incompatible with GPL3, - and adpoting (L)GPL3 would cause non-FLOSS guys to yell even louder, they gave a patent grant and a separate BSD license for the implementation. Thus it confirms that any of above or otherwise BSD libraries are very dangerous to use even within BSD-compatible models.
Apache and (of course) GPL3 though have patent grants this or other way (beside legally valid form).
Does it now mean, your whole project is legally valid to copy on BSD terms, but completely prohibited to actually use in any way, hm?
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