[H-GEN] GPL -> Non-GPL licence change

[Arjen Lentz]

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Hi,

On Fri, 2002-04-12 at 21:31, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > The author then releases version 2.0 of UBeautProgram and says "Hey, I've
> > now decided that this will be licenced under the QPL and if you want to use
> > it for commercial purposes you have to pay me money".
> 
> Uh, the GPL's actually a pretty good license for "if you want to use it
> for commercial (read: proprietry, closed source) purposes, pay me money",

Indeed, works rather nicely here.
But as this thread also proves, this only really works if the copyright
is (co)owned by a single entity. Otherwise (non-GPL) licensing becomes a
nightmare.


> Anyway. If UBP 2.0 includes code from UBP Patch X, or UBP Patch Y, then
> Joe Blow has to respect the copyright and licensing terms of that code. If
> Mr Blow has the copyright on the code (and this could, conceivably,
> happen implicitly by John or Jane just sending in a patch and not adding a
> "copyright" line or otherwise caring), then he can use whatever licensing
> terms he wants. If Mr or Ms Doe have the copyright on portions of the
> code, then their licensing terms have to be respected. The GPL, eg,
> doesn't allow you to distribute binaries made from sources that aren't
> (essentially) entirely GPLed, whether over the Internet, or for profit.

Copyright is implicit. It applies the moment an author produces some
work. Proving this can be an issue of course (which is why you want to
put a line in the source, register somewhere), but it is important to
note the foundation of copyright.

Strictly speaking, any patch will be owned by its original author,
unless otherwise noted. In practise, little snippets of code are assumed
to be free of legal haggling.

As an example from the real world, with MySQL we accept little patches
without any legal fuss (author is credited in source/docs, of course).
For larger contributions we require assigning of the copyright to MySQL
AB (the company that holds the copyright of the MySQL code). This can be
a shared copyright, so the original author also retains the right to use
that same chunk of code elsewhere.

The key point is that MySQL AB needs to have the copyright on all of the
code used in the MySQL server, so it can provide commercial licenses to
companies who can't/won't use the GPL-licensed version. The code is the
same, the license is different. Only a full copyright holder can provide
this.


> > My question is this.  Where does this leave the other people that have
> > contributed code into the code base for this project?   Can the author
> > actually change from the GPL like this without violating the GPL?
> 
> On his own code, certainly.

Yes, since he owns his own code, he can do what he likes with it.
But he can't un-GPL someone else's code. That privilege remains with the
copyright holders of that code.
If however he co-owns the copyright, then yes he can do what he likes
with it (possibly within the bounds of a copyright sharing agreement, if
such a document exists between this person and the original author).


GPL is simply a license, based on regular copyright law. It's not
something separate. The normal rules of copyright definitely apply.


Regards,
Arjen.

-- 
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