If you are under contract that says you can not use a patent within a BSD licensed software (that grants redistribution), you will suddenly not be able to distribute software as under BSD license. The contact forbids you, and if you remove the bsd copyright notice then BSD license forbid you.
If this happen often to you, my advice is to not get into contractual agreements that contradicts with what you are trying to do.
> because Section 7 requires that no restrictions be placed on anyone.
False. Section 7 require that recipient of the software can redistribute the software. The lawyer for the European Commission was very explicit in that analysis.
The situation is this:
You have some software you wish to distribute in binary form (with source available). You also have a patent licence that allows you (and only you) to distribute software covered by that patent.
If the software is BSD licensed there is no problem. The licence allows you to distribute the software, and so does your patent licence. Other people who receive the software from you will need to get a patent licence if they want to distribute it, but that is their problem. The BSD licence says nothing about your responsibility to ensure that recipients can also distribute the software - only that you have to convey the copyright notice and the text of the licence. The bit at the start of the BSD licences saying that redistribution is permitted etc is not a condition of redistribution. The conditions are the 2 or 3 numbered conditions.
If the software is GPL licensed as soon as you try to distribute the software to somebody who doesn't have the same distribution patent licence as you then the original GPL licence becomes invalid and you can no longer distribute the software because you have violated clause 7 since the recipients of your software are not able to redistribute it.
Now I'm not a lawyer and I don't even live in the USA, so I can't talk about the validity of the restrictions the GPL tries to apply here, but that is the situation we are talking about.
Anyone is free to do a proprietary work and combine that with BSD. You can even put Microsoft's Shared Source license on it and provide source. Providing source does not mean that you got a permission to distribute (Ms-SS allow only non-commercial distribution, which would had to be permitted by the patent holder if used).
What you can not do is put BSD on the whole work, as that would conflict with the patent license. The BSD is a license that grant recipients full permission to distribute, which in this scenario the patent owner to do allow (ie, its a condition/restriction that the developer is under).
And yes, BSD and GPL is different. One is permissive, and one is copy left.
Secondly, you are not allowed to re-licence code that you do not own the copyright to (I guess a licence like WTFPL would permit it as well). Your example of taking BSD source and removing the BSD licence to replace it with a Shared Source licence is not something that is permitted. The text of the BSD licence is very clear on that point. I don't know why GNU fans continue to be confused about this. The BSD parts of a combined work will remain BSD licensed and the recipient of that source is fully able to utilise those BSD sections of the source code in ways the BSD licence allows. Putting a more restrictive licence on the combined work does not change that.
>What you can not do is put BSD on the whole work, as that would conflict with the patent license. The BSD is a license that grant recipients full permission to distribute
Again, it sounds like you are pretty confused about the issues here. The BSD licence merely covers copyright concerns. You do not need to provide a patent licence if you release code under a BSD style licence. The licence says that the copyright holder grants the recipient permission to copy, modify and redistribute the code. Any other obligations the recipient might have, such as patents, don't affect the copyright holders ability to grant that permission. I've said this several times now and I'm not sure how much clearer I can make it. Yes there is a conflict for the recipient in the sense that they may only have the copyright licence to redistribute a binary, not the patent licence. But that is an issue for the recipient and does not affect the author's right to licence their work under a BSD style licence.
For somebody going around accusing other of spreading FUD it certainly seems like you have a very weak grasp of the issues here.
If you give me software, and tell me that I have full permission to distribute it, I might do so. If the day after you try to sue me for distributing your work, I will go to a judge and say: "judge, anon1385 told me that I had full permission to distribute the work, and here is the documentation that proves it."
In the case that its the patent holder that sue me, I will still say the exact same thing to the judge. At that point, the patent holder will simply say that you did not have permission to grant such permission.
Its not a complicated concept. If you have a contract with someone, you got to follow the contract. If the contract do not allow you to give free permission for distribution, you are not allowed to give free permission for distribution. Surely, you can understand that?
downvoted for ad homenim
I am by no means the "be nice police". For some reason I found your post a bit less acceptable. Maybe because the other was more broadly painted, and yours seemed a bit more... personally directed?
> 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.* You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
* Including unlimited redistribution in source or binary form as per sections 1 and 3.
Now there's a problem. Guaranteeing the text of the GPL implicitly allows the user to infringe the patent license, while honoring the patent license violates the guarantee of the GPL. Such a binary becomes completely un-distributable. With permissive licenses that have no such clause, there's nothing preventing Company X from distributing the licensed binary and source and telling the user that if they want to redistribute a binary, to buy a patent license of their own. That's why the BSD license would not pose a problem for distribution in the presence of an extra, more restrictive license such as a patent package.
Edited to add: it occurs to me that adding such an ability to RAND requirements might be a very interesting half measure.
That is true. But in that case it is not the license that prevents me from distributing and I can negotiate with the patent holders, pay royalties and have the problem resolved.
The anti-patent clause in the GPLv2 prevents that: even if I get all the patent licensing in place, I cannot distribute the software if I cannot pass the same rights onto others. That is the whole point of it: as I understand it, it is a tool to fight the freedom battle.
> In any case, many popular open-source encoders are also under either GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1. Examples include libx264, libmp3lame, libfdk_aac, libfaac. The license hasn't prevented them being very useful to many people
That is also true. I'm just providing a different point of view, one which you might not have heard about: many commercial products cannot include those libraries because of the legal risk.
I will not respond to people that shout "FUD" without any arguments. What I wrote was not a rant, and was based on my experience in several companies, each of which got legal advice about this. So, if you believe I'm wrong, please imagine for a moment that I'm building tablets (hence, "distributing" software), I have licensed all the relevant patents (thus, I pay royalties) and describe how you think Section 7 of the GPLv2 permits me to distribute software that requires payment of royalties.
EDIT: after reading all the (unnecessarily heated) responses, I think I will have to draw some diagrams. People seem to misunderstand the problem. Again: with many other licenses I can license the patents, and the patent license will cover all my (and my users') usage. With GPLv2 this is not possible, because Section 7 requires that no restrictions be placed on anyone.
In other words: yes, it is true that patents are problem for all licenses. No, it is not true that GPLv2 is equivalent to BSD/MIT/other licenses in this regard.