On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Greg Zartman <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> I'm pretty sure what Charlie is saying is that the copyright holder of the
> GPL work can build proprietary works off the GPLed work and distribute it
> without providing the source code. This seems to make sense to me.
Agreed - the owner of the whole work can distribute under different
terms, even concurrently. However the GPL has a requirement for all
parts of the 'work as a whole' to be covered by the GPL if any parts
are. So, unless the copyright holder of every part can be identified
and agrees (rare for large works that haven't been carefully managed
with contributor agreements for their whole lifespan), or those parts
can be replaced, distribution can only be under GPL terms, which puts
non-owners on an equal footing.
In that context it might be interesting to try to document whether
ownership has been managed in a way that would permit such changes to
licensing by anyone today. And a similarly interesting question
would be where the boundaries of a 'work' would be in the templating
system that glues the SME sytem together and distinguishes it from the
base Linux distribution. It doesn't fit the usual mode of code in a
single process but the parts are clearly related.
--
Les Mikesell
[email protected]
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