[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] add acceptable licenses to development guidelines

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 09:44:42AM +0200, GISQUET Christophe wrote:
> 
> Diego Biurrun a ?crit :
> > +   Contributions should preferrably be licensed LGPL 2.1, including an
> > +   ``or any later version'' clause.  GPL 2 including an ``or any later
> > +   version'' clause or MIT license are also acceptable.
> 
> "or any compatible license, like MIT, BSD, ..." maybe? See for instance a list 
> of compatible (from the fsf point of view) licenses here:
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html
> 
> I'm merely pointing this out because of the BSD license.

You're touching the heart of the problem.  There is no such thing as
"the BSD license".  There are multiple licenses that were used in BSD
and some of them have the advertising clause problem.  All in all there
are at least 3 variants of BSD, plus X11, MIT and other licenses that
are similar in spirit but differ in wording.  It makes sense to pick out
one of them to have consistency.

Speaking of "the BSD license" is a misnomer, albeit a very common one.
Reading the following essay will clarify things:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/bsd.html

Diego