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On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 07:48:16PM +0100, Chris Bainbridge wrote: |
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> On Thursday 21 August 2003 18:56, Jon Portnoy wrote: |
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> > On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 11:14:48AM +0100, Chris Bainbridge wrote: |
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> > > On Thursday 21 August 2003 07:50, Jon Portnoy wrote: |
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> > > > It's for our benefit. Otherwise, we're screwed. |
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> > > > |
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> > > > Frankly, sometimes we have to do things to protect ourselves, even if |
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> > > > that means that when you contribute something to us, the contributed |
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> > > > piece that becomes a part of Gentoo belongs in an intellectual property |
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> > > > sense to Gentoo. You'll find the same situation if you want to |
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> > > > contribute code to GNU projects: copyright must be assigned to the FSF |
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> > > > so they can defend themselves. |
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> > > |
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> > > Just to chip in.. it seems a dangerous policy to advocate all of the |
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> > > copyrights being held in one place. Even if you trust Gentoo Technologies |
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> > > Inc. do you trust everyone else that has financial dealings with this |
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> > > company? Do you trust that no one in the world will sue Gentoo Tech. |
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> > > Inc., say for patent infringement, or maybe claim a contract dispute and |
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> > > say that they own xxx lines of already contributed code? |
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> > > |
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> > > All it takes is for GTI to lose one court case and be bankrupted and it |
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> > > will be obligated to sell its assets to pay court costs and fines. Now |
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> > > any code where the copyright is solely held by GTI can have its license |
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> > > changed to a closed, non-free one, and at that point a proprietory |
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> > > non-free fork of Gentoo can be made. The GPL was explicitly designed to |
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> > > prevent this but when copyright is assigned you must make clear in the |
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> > > contract that the code can never be unGPLed. |
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> > |
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> > The GPL already states that. |
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> |
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> That is incorrect. See for example the Sistina GFS fiasco. GFS was a GPL |
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> product which had contributor copyrights assigned to Sistina. Then they |
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> decided to go closed source, taking all the user contributions with them. |
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> |
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Sorry, perhaps I misinterpreted. You can relicense it, however you can't |
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retroactively revoke the GPL; i.e., older versions that were under the |
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GPL stay under the GPL. |
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-- |
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Jon Portnoy |
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avenj/irc.freenode.net |
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-- |
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gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
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