GPL and private contracts

Posted Mar 25, 2007 0:53 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: GPL and private contracts by malor
Parent article: The Torvalds Transcript (InformationWeek)

Both types of code have a price. One is money, but allows the freedom to keep your code closed. The other is usually low- or no-cost, but denies you freedom to hide your code.

This is wrong. You can certainly keep your modifications to GPL code secret. If you distribute the modified code, you have to share the source to the changes.

Note that in the case of closed source you don't have the right to distribute anything, not the original version nor your modified one.

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GPL and private contracts

Posted Mar 25, 2007 0:57 UTC (Sun) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, this is true, but this particular thread is talking about a chain of people, from A to B to C to D. giraffe seems to be asserting that the GPL is somehow unethical or something in that it 'interferes with' other business relationships, and I'm trying to point that this is the PRICE of using the code, and that it's entirely optional. If you don't like the price, buy commercial code instead.

You give up rights in either case, it's just a matter of which rights fit your particular situation the best.

GPL and private contracts

Posted Mar 25, 2007 1:15 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

giraffe seems to be asserting that the GPL is somehow unethical or something in that it 'interferes with'

It's "or something," and in particular I'm asserting that GPL is unusual among copyright licensing schemes. Nothing more. I jumped into this thread when someone made an incorrect statement about what one can do with GPL code, based on reasoning that would be sound for any conventional licensing scheme. I went beyond correcting the particular misstatement to explain you have to use a whole different mindset when looking at what's allowed with GPL code.

The misstatement, IIRC, was that a downstream distributor could make a private deal with his distribuee in which the latter doesn't avail himself of GPL freedoms, and the copyright owner wouldn't have anything to say about it.