general copyright question

Mike Parker aldacron71 at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 27 03:02:32 PDT 2008


Walter Bright wrote:
> Saaa wrote:
>>> Often, this means that --help or some option advertised by --help 
>>> (like --version or even --license) might spit out the notice.
>>
>> But lets asume you would use multiple sources with these kind of 
>> licenses.
>> spitting out multiple notices is possible althought it would be kind 
>> of long.
>> Take Derelict; If you spit out the notice for every sourcefile you 
>> used that
>> would end up being hundreds of lines of notice.
>>
>> And how do you make clear that the license isn't the license of your 
>> program?
>> Because as I understand it: the program using the sourcecode doesn't need
>> to have the same license (otherwise commercial use wouldn't be possible)
> 
> I agree that can be onerous. I'd ask the copyright holder:
> 
> "exactly what string do you want me to output, and under what 
> circumstances should it be output?"

In this particular case, this is the modified BSD license used by many 
open source projects. There's no need to print out any strings, nor to 
contact the copyright holder. The BSD is the BSD and isn't going to 
change on the whim of a single developer unless he modifies it and 
rebrands it as a new license entirely.

That's why I chose the modified BSD for Derelict. It's not viral, is in 
widespread use and is generally well understood.



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