On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 03:59:08PM -0500, Daniel Ouellet wrote:

quoted text
> Richard Stallman wrote:

>>     recently we saw theft of BSD to GPL, and a large part of the

>>     GPL community thinks there's no problem with that, that the

>>     BSD community is being "petty" to make an issue out of it.

>>

>> I don't think it is wrong in general to relicense code from BSD to

>> GPL.  However, in some cases I think it is more useful not to do so,

>> in order to contribute changes back to the original BSD-licensed

>> project.

>

> How could you in all conscience come and *talk, arguing, judging and

> pretend to defend and promote freedom* when you are in fact publicly

> promoting license to steel!?

>

> Richard, *the secret software agent 007 with license to kill*?

>

> How dare you to come and talk about freedom and promoting actions like

that!

quoted text
>

> You *can't relicense* code under your choice without the author consent

> period!

I assumed that the issue was *adding* GPL code to a BSD-licenced project,

not changing the licence on the already-written code. In this case, RMS

is right that there is nothing technically wrong with this, but that

licencing the code under a BSD licence may be more useful.
You are right, of course, that only the licence-holder can change the

licence. I'd prefer to assume, though, that RMS simply misunderstood the

hypothetical situation, rather than intentionally recommending copyright

violation.
	Ben
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]