I'm trying to grok the GPL and was wondering if folks here might shed some light on this hypothetical situation, or point me in the right direction of where else to ask.
Let's say I create this code called hello.world.sh: #!/bin/bash # (c) 2005 - Robert Citek # Licensed under the GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) echo "Hello, World" From what I understand, I am the owner of the code under copyright law and I am granting others to copy, modify, use, and distribute my code under the terms of the GPL license. Now, let's imagine someone does modify my code and then distributes the new version. They call their code hello.world.sh and it looks like this: #!/bin/bash # (c) 2005 - John Doe # Licensed under the GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) echo "Hello, World" Notice that the only change is the name next to the copyright notice. Have they violated the GPL, after all they are free to modify the code and they are providing it under the GPL, too? Have they violated my copyright? Or is this acceptable and legal under copyright and/or the GPL? BTW, I was thinking that http://www.gnu.org/ might be a better place to ask this question, but I didn't see any forum for such discussions. Again, pointers in the right direction gladly accepted. Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list CWE-LUG@lists.firepipe.net http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
