At a glance: GPL, CDDL and BSD

You should remember the recent license issue about the legal imposibility to distribute cdrtools binaries under both CDDL and GPL, which led to a fork — namely, cdrkit.

You might also remember I have no particular problems with CDDL, as it’s a perfectly free license, as long as you don’t try to mix it with GPL — remember, GPL does not mix with anything else: a GPL derivative must be fully under GPL too!

I also stated that BSD is the ultimate freedom for the user, and this is because under BSD:

you are not forced to distribute modified sources;
you are not forced to distribute sources, generally speaking;
you can propagate derived works under any license you want.

OK, so that was freedom as in BSD versus imposed freedom.

The blog of a Security Coordination Team Engineer at Sun Microsystems Inc., Chandan, has a very cute synopsis of Copyrights, Licenses and CDDL Illustrated.

Chandan is not a lawyer (and neither am I), but the graphical face-to-face illustration of the main rights in various licenses is definitely very suggestive.

Also note the simple and clear definition of what the CDDL and GPL incompatibility is like: «Incompatibility in the sense: to combine two source files, one under GPL and another under CDDL, to create a common executable.»

Back to the images, I felt like I would need an even simpler approach, limited to what’s of interest for source code — thus, “perform” and “display” are not of interest — but Chandan forgot to mention if the images are licensed under a Creative Commons license or something.

You should considered my modified charts as a “fair usage” of Chandan’s work. Should they be unclear, or should you want a comparison with proprietary EULA too, refer to the original.

licensestake1bq0 At a glance: GPL, CDDL and BSD
licensestake2nw0 At a glance: GPL, CDDL and BSD
P.S.: I have to admit however that the distribution of the CDDL’ed Nexenta OS together with the GPL’ed GNU userland programs is the most fine legal irony one could imagine…