That's an interesting question, Robert. Philisophically, I think this hypothetical scenario raises some important questions - do creators retain ownership of their content under community licensing? Even if they retain legal ownership in these scenarios, once a creator gives his or her content to the community do they retain conceptual or practical ownership?
So turning to the legal side of this question of ownership, I have a question: if a company GPL's a piece of software, can they un-GPL it? If so, does everybody have to stop using the open source products that were built on that original GPL'd code?? Furthermore, if a company GPL's some code (say Sun's OpenOffice for instance, or the recent "code grants" by IBM and others), and it gets added to and added to and modified and added to and built on and used and adapted, etc. etc. at what point does that original copyright notice no longer apply? At what point is including that copyright notice not exactly accurate anymore -- i.e. code that says "copyright some company" when in fact 80% of the work has since been done by OS coders.... I suppose the answers to these questions are explained in fine print in the licensces (especially the "proptietary-open-source" licesnes some of the big guys use...) dylan _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
