Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 23:09:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dcs@newsguy.com (Daniel C. Sobral) Cc: jobaldwi@vt.edu, rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in, kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, asmodai@wxs.nl, stuyman@confusion.net Subject: Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra Message-ID: <199905072309.QAA29559@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <372F868D.D6F66EEE@newsguy.com> from "Daniel C. Sobral" at May 5, 99 08:45:17 am
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> That is not true. The copyright owner can release the software in as > many possible and conflicting licenses as he wants. Unless that software incorporates patches for which the copyright has not been assigned. Then they can only make subsequent releases under the original license. So for example, if you had an audio tool, released it under both licenses, and someone made changes to it under one of those licenses and sent them back to you, you could only incorporate those changes into one of the releases without an assignment of copyright. So if you put something out under a license, say the GPL, and it bounces around for 4 years gathering improvements, if you want to make it into a commercial binary-only product to keep people from just taking your code and undercutting your price until you can't make any money selling it, you have to start with the original code from 4 years ago, and can't use any of the code improvements, unless you get an assignment of copyright. Kaffe works like this, and so does the FSF code. In order to get the code accepted into the source tree, there is a requirement of assignment of copyright. Technically, RMS could relicense all of the FSF code under a different license, at will, if someone paid him enough to overcome his religious compunctions (e.g. if he nedded a kidney, and the only way to get it was to relicense the code for the money needed to pay for the transplant surgery). Kind of makes you think about how deep those convictions really go... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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