Single-company free software

Single-company free software

Posted Oct 11, 2005 15:00 UTC (Tue) by MortFurd (guest, #9389)
In reply to: Single-company free software by drag
Parent article: Single-company free software

SNIP...

All I wanted to get across though was that the GPL has no transfer of the ownership of the copyrights, those are retained by the author and if that person or company owns all the copyrights then they can release versions under whatever license they choose. If they don't own all the copyrights to the software then they can only release under GPL if they obtained the software, at least partially, under the GPL themselves.

That is the one absolutely correct statement that you have made. The copyright owner can change the license to take a piece of software out from the GPL. If you don't have full ownership of the copyright to it, then you cannot take a piece of GPLed software and place it under a different license.

On the other hand, even if you do own all copyright on a piece of GPLed software, you still cannot revoke the rights granted on previous versions of the software. Your new version can be proprietary, or be under any license you like - even one and the same version of the software can be available under different licenses. The GPLed copy stays under the GPL, though. This is what gives Free (as in freedom) software the ability to fork and continue even if the original copyright owner drops the project or takes it proprietary.

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