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

[Luke Francl <fran0382@tc.umn.edu>]

On Wed, 17 May 2000, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:

> 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.

This is untrue, and what Mike said was partially untrue. 

You are right that you cannot take away GPL'd code (but neither, really,
can you "take away" BSD code, so long as some one, some where, has a
mirror of the origional). But as the copyright holder, you are allowed to
license under whatever terms you want (Perl for example is licensed under
two terms; Mike also mentioned RieserFS). You can release under GPL, and
then if Big Company X comes to you and says "We want to use your software
-- but we don't want it to be GPL'd" you can say, "OK, I'll license it to
you for $50,000." It doesn't have to be a new version or anything. BUT,
this un-GPL version _cannot_ contain ANY GPL code, because they are
incompatible.

This, in general, prevents a company from using code to their own
advantage and not contributing back to the community. Which *can* happen
with BSD-style licenses. Examples are endless: Solaris, the Strongarm web
server, I believe even Windows contains BSD code (ping, etc)! These
companies give nothing back, and that sucks.

Luke