Single-company free software [LWN.net]

Single-company free software

Posted Oct 12, 2005 12:29 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: Single-company free software by hgj
Parent article: Single-company free software

If a single entity holds the copyright to the entire project, then it doesn't need a license to create derivative works, so they could use whatever license they want.

Two ways to prevent this are:

Make sure no one owns copyright on the entire work. That way license changes require consensus (which would mean the project wasn't covered by this article).
Transfer ownership of the code to a separate entity such as a foundation (as discussed in the article). This way the original author's rights are clearly defined by the license it receives from the foundation. Depending on the bylaws of such a foundation and the license it grants, this might not actually be any better though ...

(Log in to post comments)

Single-company free software

Posted Oct 13, 2005 8:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

<blockquote>
If a single entity holds the copyright to the entire project, then it doesn't need a license to create derivative works, so they could use whatever license they want.
</blockquote>
This depends on how they got that copyright. If RMS went insane and the FSF decided to relicense its stuff under something not similar in spirit to the GPL (say, the Eat-Your-Babies EULA, which requires the eating of one baby for each copy redistributed), all those copyright assignments the developers signed would have their terms violated. What would happen then I don't know; a huge legal crapfest, probably...