On Nov 10, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Dylan Hassinger wrote: > 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?
IANAL, but my opinion would be that each person owns their respective parts. For example, let's say I write the same code as before: #!/bin/bash # (c) 2005 - Robert Citek # Licensed under the GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) echo "Hello, World" And you add to it so that the code becomes this: #!/bin/bash # (c) 2005 - Dylan Hassinger # (c) 2005 - Robert Citek # Licensed under the GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ) echo "Hello, World. How are you?" In this case I own all the parts that I wrote and you own all the parts you wrote, thus the added copyright notice. Who owns the whole? My guess would be that neither of us do, because ownership implies that I can change the license, which I cannot do for the parts you own. > 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?? My guess would be that if they un-GPL'd the code, the new license would only cover the code from that point forward. Previously GPL'ed code would remain GPL'ed. In effect the company would be creating a fork. Of course, they would have to purge any GPL contributed code because they don't own those pieces. The contributors do. > 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.... Again, my guess would be that each contribution has it's own copyright. So the copyright notice should probably read "(c) yyyy - some company and contributors". Or maybe each contributer should be adding his/her copyright notice in succession, just like I added yours in the example above. Or maybe there's a list of contributors separate from the work. I don't recall seeing any of those different scenarios, but then I've never paid that much attention to multiple copyrights, either. I've mostly been looking at the type of license. > 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...) Not that I'm aware of. Here's a list of them: http://opensource.org/licenses/ and the GPL: http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php For comparison, the BSD license explicitly states that the copyright notice must remain: http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php 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 [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
