License conflict for VM screensaver (kdeartwork)

[Ben Burton]

Hi,

(CCing debian-legal since they know better than I do.  The problem here
is a potential conflict between GPL and BSD-with-advertising-clause; see
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=109779477208076&w=2 for my
original post.  The question now is whether the advertising clause can
be assumed to be rescinded.  Any comment would be welcome.)

> The UC Regents rescinded the advertising clause in 1999.

But the vm_random.c used in kdeartwork appears to have been taken and
modified from BSD before then.

Certainly the change in 1999 applies to BSD software distributed since
then, as evidenced by the fact that they removed the advertising clause
from the corresponding source files.  But it's not obvious to me that
the change applies to software distributed beforehand (such as random.c
from which vm_random.c was modified).  There's also the trouble that the
license they are modifying in your link is similar to but not the same
as the license on vm_random.c (presumably because vm_random.c was from a
much older BSD).

And aside from this, there's the problem that vm_random.c was modified
since it was taken from BSD, and the modifications are presumably also
under the BSD-with-advertising-clause (since that's what vm_random's
copyright notice says).  In this case, my understanding is that UC Berkeley
cannot change the licensing for someone else's modifications.

Ben.