License war: was:Re: [TCLUG:17728] Motif has gone opensource!

[Daniel Taylor <dante@plethora.net>]

On Wed, 17 May 2000, 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

Only if you are not the original, sole copyright holder.
GPL does not remove the copyright holders rights, it gives rights to
the people to whom the software is distributed.


> 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

And the BSD license prevents this in what way?

And they obtain the credibility to take over an actively maintained
project how?


> the source will remain open from the time it is GPL'd forward.  So,

Exactly.  With the BSD license they can take it from you, fork it, close
the source so that you don't have access to it, and you can do _nothing_
about it, because you told them it was OK to do so by your choice of
license. GPL prevents this abuse of publicly available code.

> 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.  

On the contrary, you retain the rights to the code. The BSD license does
not even give you that.  Do you believe that BSDi has access to all the
changes Cisco or Sun has made to the BSD base over the years?

How about the rights to the source for the changes MS made to Kerberos?


> 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.

On the contrary, as the sole copyright holder you may sell the code to
anyone under any mutually agreed license.  The GPL is not a mechanism for
removing rights, it is a mechanism for granting rights.

The right to publish is *granted* to the recipient by both BSD license and
GPL, GPL puts a restiction on that right that republishing _must_ include
source code access.  The right to publish is _always_ available to the
original copyright holder, under whatever terms they may set and agree to.

>  If you do, you must
> post the modified source code to the net to be available to everybody.
>
Not if you are the sole copyright holder, only if you are downstream. 


Daniel Taylor                Embedded and custom Linux integration.
dante@plethora.net           (612)747-1609