[sldev] ESC exempt from open source and GPL licensing?

Dale Glass dale at daleglass.net
Sat Nov 10 19:05:56 PST 2007


On Sunday 11 November 2007 03:35:20 Taran Rampersad wrote:
> Software developers aren't lawyers and shouldn't have to be. Saying that
> the code is GPL'd attracts developers who contribute in good faith. You
> can discuss legality until the cows come home, but if you want to milk
> said cows you better be nice to your developers.
And it is GPLd.

The key to understanding the situation is what happens with multiple people 
working on a program. Note that I'm not a lawyer, so this might be wrong.

The author itself may release under any license they please, but this only 
applies to other people. The author can always choose to license their 
code under different terms to other people. 

Now, when contributing generally one of two things happens.

If you contribute without any extra conditions attached, your code is GPL, 
and the original code is GPL. If the author integrates your patch, then 
they couldn't sell that source, since now there's code with your copyright 
on it. The original author can sell their part of it, but not your without 
your consent since the terms of the GPL won't permit it. This is for 
example what happens with the Linux kernel: There's source from thousands 
of authors. It can't really stop being GPL because doing so would involve 
getting consent or removing the code from thousands of different people, 
many of which can't be located, won't consent or are dead.

Now if the original creator wants to sell closed source liceses or 
something of the sort, this situation isn't good for the creator. So what 
they do is require all contributors to sign a form that states they 
transfer the copyright to them. I guess this is like saying, this program 
may be GPLd, but I contribute under the terms of the BSD. That means the 
author can sell their code + your BSD code under restrictive terms since 
the BSD allows it. This model is followed by SL, GNU (funny, huh? They do 
that so that they can upgrade the license like GPL2 to GPL3 when they come 
up with a new one), MySQL (IIRC), etc.


Now, if you don't sign anything, the SL code is still GPLd. It's just that 
accepting your patch would stop LL from being able to license the code 
under different terms to other people, as if they tried you could sue them 
for copyright infringement of your code. So they won't. But that doesn't 
stop you from working on your own viewer, or contributing to one of the 
other ones.
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