Re: Economics and the GPL

On Sat, 15 Jun 2002 02:30, Francois Gouget wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 8 Jun 2002, Francois Gouget wrote:
<snip>
> An alternative is to use the X11 or BSD licenses which let you change
> the license of the project without requiring copyright assignment. But
> then, so can others. So you may end up facing competition from
> companies or forks based on incompatible licenses, both of which have
> the potential of taking users and developpers away from your project.

Careful with that statement.  You cannot change the license of any code
if you do not have the copyright assignment.  You can wrap the code in
another license, but the original code still has the license applied to
it.  I have seen GPL code writers do this to XFrisk.  Version 1.1 was
under the X11 license while version 1.2, done by someone else, had
removed the X11 license and replaced it with the GPL.

I just do not want people to believe that this is legal.  If it was
legal, I could just as easily rip the code off of GPL code and put the
BSD license on it.

<snip>

> > To be exacting about this, the GPL is just as "proprietary" as Microsoft's
> > EULA is.  The proprietor (such as it were) of GPL code is the community of
> > developers willing to operate under the restrictions of the GPL, rather
> > than a single legal entity.  In fact, it is the coercion within the GPL
> > which makes it proprietary -- the BSD and X11 licenses are not proprietary.
>
> There you go again completely distorting the meaning of words just to
> fit your claims.

I may or may not agree with the coercion word, but his use of
proprietary appears correct to me.  In fact, I have thought this way
about the GPL being a community-based proprietor for more than a year.

<snip>

Sean
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