[Project-managers] editing external codes

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, Ted Ralphs wrote:

> Stefan Vigerske wrote:
>
>> If you distribute code via svn, then you have to put is unter the CPL
>> (or at least something compatible). I don't know if this will be ok in
>> your case, i.e., if the GPL is compatible with the CPL.
>
> Just to be clear, legally, we can redistribute anything that is under an
> open-source license (including GPL) in source form. The compatibility of
> licenses is not really an issue unless you want to distribute binaries.
> In general, you cannot distribute binaries that include both GPL'd and
> CPL'd code.
>
> It is COIN policy, however, that everything in your project must be
> under a single license, so you should not add GPL'd code to your
> project's svn repository, even if you don't plan on distributing binaries.

A further minor clarification:  Everything in a single COIN-OR repo must 
be covered by a single license arrangement, though that arrangement might 
include dual licenses.  CppAD, for example is licensable under either CPL 
or GPL, depending on the user's preference and the license of the user's 
code (if that is redistributed).

What you can't do is have some code in your repo covered by the CPL and 
some other code covered by the GPL.  In particular, you couldn't 
redistribute GPL code as part of an otherwise CPL COIN-OR repo.

Also, all authors/owners must consent to the license policy for the 
project's repo.

>
> Under special circumstances, COIN might agree to distribute modified
> versions of other open source projects from a separate SVN repository,
> but as Andreas pointed out, getting the developers to incorporate your
> patches is the best approach. The next best is to provide a script that
> downloads the code from an external source and automatically patches it,
> as as discussed by Stefan. Of course, this won't work too well in
> MSVC++. Those users would need to apply the patch by hand, I guess.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ted
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs