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

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 03/16/2010 07:11 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> 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.

Stefan,

Please note that Mr. Schilling does not speak in any way for the Fedora
Project, and his... unique... license interpretations are not correct
for Fedora.

There is a linking incompatibility between a library with a license of
"BSD with advertising" and a binary with a license of "GPLv2" (or v3,
for that matter). You should double check that the license on that
library is actually BSD with advertising (if the copyright holder is the
Regents of the University of California, the advertising clause has been
dropped). If you can let me know which library is in use, I would be
happy to look into this for you.

If it is actually BSD with advertising, I would ask the upstream if they
would be willing to drop the advertising clause, as they may be unaware
of the problems it causes. If they are not, the alternative would be for
the copyright holder of the GPLv2'd code to add an explicit exception to
permit this scenario, and we could propose some suggested exception text
to them.

If _that_ still doesn't work, then the GPLv2 code would not be able to
be included in Fedora (assuming that it is dependent upon the BSD with
advertising library).

Thanks,

Tom Callaway, Fedora Legal

P.S. I am not a lawyer, this should not be considered legal advice. I
do, however, consult with Red Hat Legal regularly.