[ros-users] BSD license questions
Nicholas Butko
nbutko at ucsd.edu
Sun Feb 13 01:03:31 UTC 2011
Thanks, Gary.
Keep up the good work on OpenCV. It is getting better all the time, and is a joy to use. It is so good that I haven't reinstalled Matlab since I swapped my harddrive out in September, and that is saying quite a lot.
--Nick
On Feb 12, 2011, at 3:31 PM, Gary Bradski wrote:
> Of course, when asking legal questions of a user's group, the resulting advice is worth at best exactly what you paid for and at worst, there's not bottom limit.
>
> Now let me tell you my half-cocked <= $0.0 interpretation.
>
> Yes, the BSD language isn't completely clear and could be read in a way that BSD is a bad bad viral license invalidating and making free anything you've ever done or thought of doing. You will find user group discussions to this effect if you spend too much time on the web as do I.
>
> However, the clear and commonly understood intent of the BSD license is:
> Make hay! Use and abuse the code any way you want.
>
> Many big companies with their buildings of bored corporate lawyers seem to use BSD and interpret it in the make hay way. Berkeley itself holds this view (so I've read by someone who's grandmother told her that she heard it from someone who knew). I suspect that most uses of BSD code doesn't even include the BSD conditions. A bunch of things that use OpenCV don't include the BSD verbiage and one day I intend to hold absolutely ... none of them accountable. I can't speak for the ROS developers, but I've seen them shudder with religious ecstasy every time someone even thinks about using ROS ... so I'm guessing they'll let BSD slide.
>
> Gary
>
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Nicholas Butko <nbutko at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> I have a general question about BSD licenses for statically compiled libraries.
>
> The BSD license states, among other things,
>
> {{{
> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,
> are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
>
> ...
>
> * Redistribution's in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
> this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
> and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
> }}}
>
> Is shipping an executable that statically links portions of a BSD library "redistribution"? Does the BSD license agreement need to incorporated in that case?
>
> The above clause is meant to apply to the library. However, when using statically linked libraries, they become incorporated into a larger binary, which is usually not redistributable.
>
> How are these cases usually interpreted?
>
> --Nick
>
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