Re: [TCLUG:17728] Motif has gone opensource!

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

"Thomas T. Veldhouse" wrote:
> 
> > Wrong. As long as you maintain full copyright you may release your code
> > under _any_ license you wish at any time. GPL only becomes a problem
> > for relicensing in cases like the Linux kernel where copyright is
> > shared (I know that I wouldn't give my approval in that case, and there
> > are many others who would not as well).
> >
> 
> No - you are wrong.  Once GPL - forever GPL.  You have no say about what
> anybody else does with it.  They can branch development on you and if they
> do the job better than you - you disappear into history.  GPL just assures
> the source will remain open from the time it is GPL'd forward.  So,
> essentially, the copyright becomes meaningless once GPL'd.  Sure, you have
> the copyright, but you have no rights to the code under GPL, other than your
> name will travel with the source.   Because of GPL, you can not take your
> code to, let's say Microsoft, and then modify it and include it in their
> operating system without making the source available.  If you do, you must
> post the modified source code to the net to be available to everybody.

Well, if you are the original author, you can re-license whatever you
wrote, although you usually have to make a new version and can't
retroactively re-license.  So, you could release version 0.9 of a
program under the GPL, then tweak some things and release version 1.0
under a different license.  Of course, the 0.9 version remains GPLed,
and anyone can use that as a code base.

The Free Software Foundation recommends changing copyright ownership to
the FSF instead of any individual for just this reason (though it's
conceivable that the FSF could, in a particularly twisted move, change
all the software that is `owned' by them to be under something other
than the GPL).

Then there are the particularly weird people, like the developers of
ReiserFS, that use a dual GPL/commercial license -- totally screwy,
IMHO.

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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]