[Fedora-legal-list] Licensing question: BSD with advertising + GPL

[Joerg Schilling]

Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus <stefan at seekline.net> wrote:

> The licensing list [1] states that the license "BSD with advertising" is
> not compatible with GPLv2/v3. But what means compatible? For example, I
> would like to use/create a package for a library which is released as
> "BSD with advertising". Consider an application licensed as GPLv2 which
> uses the shared library. Is this allowed? In this case the library would
> be licensed as "BSD with advertising" and the application which uses
> that library as GPLv2. If I remember right, then there was some kind of
> clause in the GPLv2/v3 license which said that even linking against such
> a library is not allowed but I'm really not sure. Maybe my mind plays
> tricks with me ;-)

The GPLv2 permits to link against any independently developed library (which 
therefore is an independend work) regardless of the license of the library.

The legal reason for this is that the act named above does not create a derived
work but rather a "collective work" that is not restricted by the GPLv2.

If you include a library with BSD+advertising in a distro, you of course need
to advertise ;-)

Jörg

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