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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

XScreenSaver was released under the BSD license, one of the oldest and most permissive of the free software licenses. It turns out, the Gnome-screensaver authors copied large parts of XScreenSaver into their program, removed the BSD license and slapped a GPL license on my code instead -- and also removed my name. Rude.

That's troubling. How do people expect the GPL to be respected when distributions don't respect other people's licenses?

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The commit message [1] removing JWZ from the AUTHORS file isn't very informative.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210116154429/https://gitlab.gn...

That’s… not how derivative works and copyright work.

Replies from Linux Mint contributors to this point make for fairly interesting reading: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354...

> I would gladly meet the liar for a cage fight, winner takes all.

Lots of GPL advocates think they can re-license BSD as GPL because BSD is permissive. Of course, there is nothing in the BSD license allowing this, only the copyright holder can re-license.

This isn't relicensing it's removed of a person's copyright. That would not go well if it was done to them.

The code in question was re-licensed under GPL without the author's permission. And according to the BSD license, the copyright must remain intact. A person can use BSD licensed code in a larger work under GPL or they can put the modifications under GPL, but they have no authority to change the original BSD license.

The belief of being able to re-license BSD code is quite prevalent in the Linux community and is often espoused here on Hacker News.

The BSD license does not require that you redistribute it under the BSD license. You can decide to instead license your modified version under any license you feel like, so long as you retain the original copyright notice.

The BSD license does not require that you redistribute it under the BSD license

Which line of the BSD license allows you to remove the BSD license from the source file? Since the license specifically says "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer."

so long as you retain the original copyright notice.

Which they did not retain.

You cannot relicense if you don’t have the rights. A license does not change authorship rights or copyright, it just controls how other people can expand the work or distribute it. This particular license explicitly forbids others to remove the copyright notice or change the license:

> Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Then, they also removed the copyright notice...

> How do people expect the GPL to be respected when distributions don't respect other people's licenses?

Easy: they are different groups of people. The people who expect/want the GPL to be respected and the people who strip other people's licenses with reckless abandon are not the same people.

The same could happen with any license, there's nothing in the GPL which can make you more prone to disrespecting other author's software.

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