Would you be willing to dual license MIT / GPL?

[phayes]

Hi,

I'm one of the maintainers for the geocoder module for Drupal (an open-source content-management system). You can see the module page here: http://drupal.org/project/geocoder

We'd like to make extensive of your awesome Geocoder library in our project. Ideally we would like to distribute it packaged with our module, but given that Drupal is licensed under the GPLv2 and Geocoder library is licensed as MIT that is not currently possible. Would you be willing to dual-license your project as both GPLv2 and MIT? This would allow us to legally distribute it with our module.

FYI, jQuery is also dual-licensed MIT and GPLv2 (http://jquery.org/license/) so that it can be legally shipped with GPL projects.

Thank you for your consideration,

~Patrick Hayes

[willdurand]

The MIT license is really permissive, I don't understand why you cannot use Geocoder without this dual license.
You are allowed to do whatever you want with the code..

Would you mind be more precise?

[phayes]

So this is what I think it comes down to:

It's not really a big if I never plan on changing in the bundled Geocoder library (or am merely applying update from your repo) as I can license the entire distribution under the GPL and note that the bundled Geocoder library portion is licensed MIT.

However, I think this starts to break down as soon as there are any local modifications to the Geocoder library. Basically it is not possible for a chunk of code to be licensed as both GPL and MIT at the same time as they are incompatible (GPL requires certain restrictions that MIT explicitly waves). A dual license is an invitation to use one or other other (but not both!).

I could likely get away with bundling it but not doing any local modifications, which would be acceptable but not ideal.

Anyways, I think everything I've said makes sense. This licensing stuff makes my head spin. I would be really curious to know if my reasoning is the same reason jQuery applied a dual license.

[phayes]

P.S Here's a stack overflow that helps explain why I can't just relicense MIT as GPL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4035702/can-i-relicense-someones-mit-code-under-gpl

[rande]

You need to ask current contributors if there are agree on updating the licence. Some people might want to see their codes only on MIT and not in GPL.

[GromNaN]

@phayes Could you simply specify that your Drupal package contains Geocoder package licenced MIT ?

Like symfony1 : http://svn.symfony-project.org/branches/1.4/COPYRIGHT

[willdurand]

@phayes Drupal is adopting Symfony2 components (MIT license), and I don't see any request for a dual license.

[phayes]

Yup, OK. I see that how Symfony2 does it is the way to go. I can have a single project where the different components are licensed differently.

Sorry for creating confusion and clogging the queue.