Request for a license change

From: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_cloudmark.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:45:08 -0700

I've received a request from someone working on Fedora. They want to create what I guess would be a Fedora-supported RPM of OpenDKIM. This would obviously improve our exposure and is good news.

They're saying though the four-clause BSD license we're using for our code conflicts with the GPL, which they use, because the GPL disallows distribution of code that imposes more licenses than the GPL does. I'm a little confused by this since their own license matrix says four-clause BSD is allowable, but they're pushing the issue. They're asking if we'd consider changing our license terms to the three-clause BSD license.

(Four-clause BSD contains a term that says if you use our code in your project or product, you have to give us credit for it. The UC Regents dropped this clause some time ago, yielding the three-clause BSD license which is apparently directly compatible with the GPL.)

Since we've been in operation less than a year and dkim-milter still gets the majority of the download traffic, I think it would be unfortunate to give up that license term unless there was some larger benefit to the project by getting into the Fedora RPM base.

I'm contacting them now to ask how others have handled this in the past, but of course I need to circulate this here for discussion.

Is there any harm to removing that clause from our license? Or is the benefit of being included in Fedora worth all that?
Received on Wed Mar 17 2010 - 17:45:19 PST