Hey software license knowledgeable friends. We recently put code out for a paper that is BSD licensed.
What would happen if some other company forked it and made a bunch of changes/ improvements?
Would it still be copyright EA in the license on their fork? And it'd have to stay BSD right?
Ty, random curiosity :) https://github.com/electronicarts/fastnoise/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
@demofox No patent… yet ;) IME, big co lawyers prefer ASLv2 over BSD because the former comes with a patent grant for using the licensed software… which could be considered important given the domain.
@pkhuong whats the "patent grant for using the licensed software"?
Like if the company patents the work, the license implies that they are free to use the patent as well?
@demofox@pkhuong the wording is such that if a patent troll contributes to an aparche2 licensed project, they automatically grant the right to use any relevant patents to the project. It is meant to help mitigate against a kind of legal trojan horse essentially.
@demofox Its a condition of the BSD licence that the original copyright information and licence conditions be distributed with the code. The BSD licence doesn’t appear to prevent new licences on modifications as long as the conditions of the BSD license continue to be met on the original parts of the code. Modifiers do not need to use the BSD licence or any licence for their code changes.
@demofox original copyright always remains (changes fall under the modifying party's copyright), and all the various BSD licenses require the copyright notice and the license text to be preserved. However, there is no requirement for derivatives to be distributed under the same license, nor for the source code to be disclosed at all.
@lunarood is there some % code changed that is required for something to be considered derivative and then can be licensed and copyrighted differently?
@demofox BSD licenses are extremely permissive. They don't actually care about modification at all. You are allowed to distribute the original software verbatim under any terms of your choice (both the source and/or a binary), as long as you also convey the copyright notice and the original license text.
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