| |||||||||||||
FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcyFSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcyPosted Jul 30, 2012 16:52 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy by dskoll Parent article: FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy
The problem is, $LARGE_CORP would still get access to all of the code under the "GPLv2/3 or later" license. It would be able to republish it under a proprietary license, for example.
And it won't be easy for projects to actually change "GPLv2/3 or later" to "GPL2/3" because it might require consent of many authors.
(Log in to post comments)
FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy Posted Jul 30, 2012 16:58 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
actually, if they just include one patch that's GPL 2/3 then the result can only be distributed under those licenses.
Yes, $LARGE_CORP could go back to an earlier version, or could work to extract individual parts, but it wouldn't take long for this to be impractical.
This "pollution" of the codebase is why Busybox officially changed from GPLv2+ to GPLv2, they realized that they had included GPLv2 only code for quite a while and instead of trying to relicense or eliminate the GPLv2 only code they shifted the project license (and therefor by default the license of future contributions) to GPLv2
FSFE wants to better protect free software licenses from bankruptcy Posted Jul 30, 2012 17:09 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I suppose that's true, but even assuming $LARGE_CORP could take Free Software and close it, the closed variant would wither and die, so there wouldn't be much point.
|
|||||||||||||