Single-company free software

Posted Oct 13, 2005 8:55 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Single-company free software by jamesh
Parent article: Single-company free software

<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...