The GPL Is a License, not a Contract

Posted Dec 4, 2003 9:08 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

If the project's copyright is infringed, they (the authors) will need to pursue the violations themselves. This can be costly, and a company is more likely to scoff at a few programmers (forcing a court case) than at the FSF.

> If the code is published under GPL, or should I say under the intensions behind GPL, for other projects, FSF seems to be willing at least to offer support in case of legal troubles.

"Support" is defined in many ways; I'm sure if the situation is serious enough, they may offer an amicus curiae brief, or (if not in court) help explain the GPL to the persons in question.

> Also the change of license, what if FSF (even very unlikely), decide they just had enough of this open source thing, and changes all the licenses to a non-open license ?

The FSF (and others) never bothered to get into "this open source thing", and thankfully still advocate free software.

However, if they do start using a non-free license, then you are screwed unless you can get all the contributors together (the contract one signs with the FSF allows you to use your own code for whatever you want; if you get all those people together, you can start over). Nathaniel Nerode, a GCC contributor, has argued the FSF has already done this with the GFDL, so it's not a complete hypothetical anymore.

Posted Dec 4, 2003 17:57 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

As an example I found a port of the x48 calculator emulator to MacOS X
including some nice changes to the timer. However they didn't abide by
the GPL. I reported the violation to the authors but their email
addresses do not appear to be current. I also reported it to the FSF
but they can't do anything about it. So the license will probably not
be enforced.