On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Greg Troxel wrote:
IANAL, TINLA but I listen to podcasts where lawyers talk: PD is a concept in American law. It does not exist, or exist as clearly, in other jurisdictions. If it turns out that in some jurisdictions it doesn't exist, then us adding a BSD license doesn't make any sense, because we aren't the author, and it doesn't resolve the lack of license from the original author. If this is a problem, the fix is to ask upstream to change from PD to CC0, which is more or less "PD, and if PD doesn't work in this jurisdiction, a license for anyone to do anything with no requirements".
Clicking around a bit, there actually is an option to buy a commercial license, for the case when procedure dictates you absolutely need to. Not a great solution, but that at least means there is already a procedure for dealing with the "PD isn't good enough" situation in place.
So.. just asking nicely "could you guys slap a BSD license on this for us" could possibly work, right? (or whatever would be appropriately close to PD - does CC0 work for software?)
Or would each original author need to do so?One of the listed reasons for getting a commercial license is "your jurisdiction doesn't recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain" - and since it appears that's exactly what the authors have done, no more and no less, it seems that in such a jurisdiction any relicensing by a third party (the project; or in this case the company) would be meaningless too.
On the other hand, if all you need is someone you could in theory pin the blame on, then at least the commercial license makes sense.
(I am not the least bit qualified to talk about this. The whole thing just seems hairier the more one looks at it...)
But having sqlite in the base system would be neat. MAgnus