Date: Sat, 22 May 1999 06:16:09 -0500 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> To: paul@originative.co.uk Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: GPL alternatives Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19990522061609.00969c10@mail.bfm.org> In-Reply-To: <A6D02246E1ABD2119F5200C0F0303D10FF5B@octopus>
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At 10:18 21-05-1999 +0100, paul@originative.co.uk wrote: >There is also the situation where you sign over the copyright. This is a >very different thing which transfers ownership of your work. Most publishers >require authors to sign over the copyright to them which is why the author >requires the publishers permission to publish elsewhere. That's what I said. You can assign your rights to someone else. >There's no hidden clause in the GPL that hands over ownership to the FSF, >you're just being paranoid. Nope, not paranoid. It's the lawyer in me talking. I said it *could* be interpreted certain way. I also said such an interpretation was not likely to prevail in court, but you never know. The fact that Perl and other software is licensed under both GPL and a different license is irrelevant from legal standpoint. Perl is not a court of law. AFAIK, GPL has never been contested in a court of law. Therefore, if someone sued Larry Wall for the double licensing, we simply cannot know how it would turn out. I am simply talking about POSSIBILITIES. I always used the verb *can* to make that clear. Anyway, this discussion has gone much farther than I care for. I am not trying to fight a war, nor am I trying to convince anyone of anything. I simply stated an interesting possible loophole, and am tired of explaining what I said to people who read into my words more than they said. I could not care less what license anyone chooses. I expressed an opinion that GPL was not the best choice. I said it was dangerous. I meant dangerous to the author, not to the rest of us. I disagree with Brett's contention that GPL is going to destroy us all. I just think it will hurt those who use it in the long run. But if they want to use it, that's their choice. >If you don't want people selling your software then you need to release it >under a much more restrictive license than either the GPL or BSD license. Obviously. For small programs I use BSD license. For a major project, like my Graphic Counter Language, I do not. In previous releases I simply stated my copyright in it. For the current release I wrote my own license given that none of the existing open-source licenses was satisfactory to what I wanted. I spent all of last night writing that license (333 lines), and am finally ready to go to bed at 6:15 am. :-) If anyone cares to read it, I posted it at http://www.whizkidtech.net/nnl/ where the nnl stands for No-Nonsense License. Adam --- Want to design your own web counter? Get GCL 2.20 from http://www.whizkidtech.net/gcl/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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