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FASM's license (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 12.09.2010, 23:12

> I don't think so. Well, even for public domain, how could you? Their code
> is their code, their (original) copyright.
But they allow you to redistribute and modify it as you wish. As for Public Domain (which isn't exactly the same as 2-clause BSD): that would mean no copyright applies, so you're free to do everything you want with it, even some things (i.e. removing the copyright/origin statements) you ain't allowed with any BSD license.

> I'm not saying I'd care or
> complain, but it seems backwards to re-license something you didn't write.
> That code should remain under the same license, it's only being compatible
> for the rest of the project that's legally important.
The point was that it's allowed. If that is the case, it doesn't mean it makes sense!

> I doubt it. Besides, BSD vs. GPL ... GPL loves BSD, but BSD hates GPL, so
> nobody would prefer GPL except diehards, esp. if it was only blindly
> re-licensed and not by original authors / copyright holders.
That's why I mentioned it in the example - although there's no Copyleft with the BSD licenses, you still can't "revoke" the freedom users get from other (here: the original) distributors.

Besides, it's the other way around: BSD loves everyone, and it allows everyone to copy the program under whatever license. GPL is a lot more picky ;-)

> (Honestly I
> wonder why anybody cares AT ALL about stupid licenses, they are so boring!
> Code is code, why is it so hard for people to share and accept?)
's what I say. It's also the reason I prefer (2-clause) BSD for the stuff I write - everyone should be happy to use it instead of worrying about their license, whether they're in a business or FSF zealots. I don't like the GPL's viral nature, so I won't spread it more if I have the choice not to.

Of course, choosing BSD for my stuff also has the practical advantage that I can switch to GPL whenever I feel like it, even if others have contributed to my (BSD) code base. Not that I anticipate that to happen. (Me feeling like changing to GPL, or contribution to my code base, you ask? Probably both.)

> Even though in theory you should be able to extract the original, in
> practice it's not always easy.
What? That example was to show how to work around your "need to change something"; I would specifically create a fork to carry that out, not use some existing one.

> But they could
> always just get the original anyways, assuming they knew that it existed
As I said, that's what the point of this whole exercise was. You certainly can redistribute a fork of a (2-/3-clause) BSD project under the GPL, but unless you improved it so much that people had a reason to prefer your fork, they wouldn't have to prefer it.

> EDIT: I think GCC will allegedly accept 20 lines or less without copyright
> assignment but nothing greater.
Really? That would be ridiculous, especially from the GNU zealots that talk about freedom all the time. If I want to write a source code file without any copyright notices, free tools should allow me to do that! (It's also a question of privacy - the tools should not scan my data for such things at all.)

> The FSF also dislikes clauses preventing commercial use, and yet I've
> seen a few "GPL" apps add that restriction.
Yep, thus are people. Legally, these applications of course ain't compatible with the GPL, they (so to say) use a non-GPL license based on the GPL.

> Truly, I honestly think (legally)
> you're only allowed to re-license your own changes.
No. Whether re-licensing work you don't "own" is ethical is an entirely different question - but I'm pretty sure it's legal. IANAL either, so we would have to ask, like, the FSF for a more definitive answer.

> I think the "whole" of
> the project can be GPL even if 99% is BSD licensed.
That is true, but only if you keep track of what is available as BSD and what is not and if you inform the receiver (ie user) about the fact that these parts are still available under BSD. Otherwise, they ain't allowed to "extract" the BSD code again, even if they know which parts these are. (Practically, if they know that although the whole project is exclusively licensed as GPL now, they'll usually have access to the original code anyway so it doesn't matter.)

> But I'm no lawyer though I'll admit I don't care what they think, they can
> invent any crazy idea, and it's insane to pretend I'll just comply blindly
> to whatever some crackpot can come up with.
The BSD and GPL licenses make perfect sense to me.

> Why, because you can't re-license it
Because it's less free. NASM is freer. That's where we started, remember?

> (do you really want to??)
No.

> or because it's "yet another" license that the world didn't need?
Yes, that too.

> The world doesn't truly "need" FASM,
Quoting that out of context might not AMUSE some :-P

> but it's a truly awesome tool, a good compliment to NASM, IMHO.
I don't know. True, there's a few things that FASM can do but NASM can not. NASM, in turn, is freer and more portable.

> I don't think Tomasz intends to restrict anyone from doing anything with
> it, including proprietary changes, which would indeed not work if it was
> GPL.
Is proprietary adaptation really allowed by that license? It says not to redistribute FASM code under any other license. Although it has the loophole that you can distribute only binaries (i.e. make the code base proprietary), you still would have to use the FASM license for your source. That means you wouldn't be allowed to combine the source with any other source code that has a license conflicting with FASM's. (For example, suppose there is a program FOO which has a license very similar to FASM's. Now you wouldn't be allowed to combine FOO's and FASM's source code, because both require all source code to use their license.) This is a practical problem, because no company would risk to violate the license like that even though arguably it would be hard to prove from the outside (when they only distribute binaries).

True, the GPL doesn't allow proprietary adaptation, but I don't think FASM's license does either. Whether that's intentional I don't know.

> Honestly, I think he has looked at NASM before, but obviously he's
> rewritten everything to suit his own ways of doing things (different
> macros, always did opcode size reduction similar to YASM, different
> algorithms).
The point was that he could now (and even before) implement OMF support by using NASM's low-level implementation as reference. Assembler syntax doesn't come into this.

---
l

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