Owen writes: “Oddly enough, this is somewhat like Open Source and its Licensing. What's to prevent someone from forking your repo and making it their own? (Happened with one of mine). But because the license was GPLv3, they weren't able to change the license and had to suffer some issues. It was clearly a rip-off, the Pull Request had > 80 commits!”
People always think of copyright law protecting proprietary work, but it can do the same job for work intended for open distribution. The FSF (a small organization) has prosecuted companies for violating the terms of the GPL. As an economic development service, I would be happy to the government do or fund that, just as it would for protecting its own works. For people that have a software project and consider it central to their livelihood, it probably won’t be productive for others to fork it. The author(s) will out-work them and have the reputation in the community that the forking agent will not. Further as an author, one could pull from their branches to take whatever improvements they made. Turnabout is fair play. But if they take the work and turn it into a proprietary product without dealing you in, it is just copyright violation and breaking the law. Marcus
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