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Re: GPL Liscensing on New Release: What Gives?
On Tue, Jan 19, 1999 at 03:23:46AM -0700, Godmar Back wrote:
> Hence, the GPL protects the interests and intellectual property rights of
> the copyright holder: not by preventing others from seeing or using the code,
> but by restricting other people's freedom to include the code into their
> products without having paid for it, if those products are of the
> traditional closed-source kind.
>
> Clearly, it does not provide full protection in that it does not prevent
> others from including (and possibly selling) the code in GPLed products
> they may offer.
>
> As an aside, this is different from what the FSF requires developers
> of GNU projects to do: they require those developers to assign their
> copyright to the FSF, preventing them from doing what I just described.
This is actually not correct. The FSF allow the copyright holder to
disclaim or transfer copyright; the clue is that the FSF want to have
a copyright on that piece of code.
However, I think you may be able to disclaim copyright on the code,
and then re-claim it, possibly with some modifications that force the
right to be held. It seems it would involve a lot of hassle to get it
right.
Eivind.
References: