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Economic interest in GPL ?Economic interest in GPL ?Posted Aug 15, 2008 14:54 UTC (Fri) by lambda (subscriber, #40735)In reply to: Economic interest in GPL ? by mikov Parent article: Why the JMRI decision matters It doesn't matter who is mentioned in the license. When I license code under the GPL, I am doing it with the understanding that if anyone modifies the code, I (and anyone else) will be able to incorporate their modifications into my version and thus derive economic benefits from their changes. So, the GPL explicitly does provide an economic interest to the author of the software. A large part of the economic benefit of free software is that not only does the original author have access to and license to distribute any changes, but anyone does; thus, it is possible for anyone in a large community to change, fix, and support the software. Additionally, the author of the software is mentioned in the copyright notice when you license something under the GPL, just not in the license itself. You write "Copyright 2008 name of author", and provide a pointer to the GPL, so you are actually mentioning your copyright claim (under recent case law regarding abandoned copyrights, this is actually fairly important, because it means that it's harder for someone to prove that they went through reasonable steps to contact the copyright holder before treating something as if it were abandoned).
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