GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 10, 2021 18:48 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement by Wol
Parent article: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Also: remember that FSF have already relicensed code which haven't belonged to them. I wonder how you have forgotten all about that and claim that Apache 2 is the only license which allows you to relicense code.

No. It's not the only one. GFDL is another. It specifically allows you to relicense code from GFDL to CC-BY-SA in certain circumstances.

Wikipedia was moved from GDFL to entirely different license, CC-BY-SA. Compare some random article in year 2008 to what we have today. GFDL is not even mentioned, you need to dig deeply to even know it was ever there and then spend a lot of efforts to recover old, GFDL-licensed version.

Note that while there was note among Wikipedia editors and majority have voted for the change thousands of editors voted against it. Yet their contributions were relicensed along with others. Simply because FSF had that right.

How is that different from relicensing of GCC from GPLv3+ to GPLv4+ from practical POV?

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 10, 2021 18:55 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

In practical terms, what matters is that the copyright holders gave Wikipedia a licence under GFDL 1.2 or any later version, and Wikipedia used section 11 of GFDL 1.3 to relicense. Had the copyright holders only offered Wikipedia a licence under GFDL 1.2 (and removed the "any later version" bit), Wikipedia's actions would be a copyright breach, and the copyright holders could pursue Wikipedia for remedies under copyright law.

It's the multi-licensing that allows Wikipedia to say "GFDL 1.3 has this clause which we will use", and that licence was agreed to by the copyright holders, even if they did not want Wikipedia to use that clause.

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 10, 2021 19:16 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Well… GCC is also licensed under “GPLv3 or later” conditions. And there are no plans to change that.