Got a question on IRC today about the licensing of a specific file in GStreamer CVS, as it was under a MIT license instead of the LGPL license. While we strive to keep our licensing simple by making all new code LGPL or in some specific cases dual licensed, there are a few cases where we got code which is under the MIT or BSD license. This create a situation where we have some files in a directory under the LGPL while others are MIT for example. While I think he have kept things on an even keel within GStreamer, I have noticed that there is a lot of confusion in the open source community in general, about how you deal with MIT and BSD code in a GPL/LGPL context. In some extreme cases I have even seen people just cut’n pasting the MIT code into their GPL project believing that the MIT ‘do what you want license’ includes the right to relicense the code. It does not.

Anyway, to clear up the details for myself I contacted Luis Villa to get some help understanding some of the possible corner cases. Luis then pointed me at this great resource from the Software Freedom Law Center for understanding how MIT and GPL code can co-exist in your codebase. I absolutely recommend reading over this to better understand the implications.