How could the original founder of an open source project, protect and keep his project as his own, and prevent other external factors ( a company or group of developers) from getting his source, invest a lot of money on the base project, start their own businness out of it, and leave the original developer out of the way?
I don't know how it is with open source projects (the GNU project doesn't concern it self with open source), but with free software projects there is no such right for the author of the orignal developer. Anyone should be free to take and make a branch, otherwise it wouldn't be free software since the right to make changes is limited. It is about the rights of users, not the author that is important. A second issue is, how could copyrights prevent this problem, if at all? Would it be unethical, or inappropriate to say, "this project is mine, and no entity can start a project with the same purpose, using my sources", at least temporarily until the project gets enough leverage that no external factor can interfere? Yes it would be unethical to do so, it would make the project non-free. If you are a good maintainer, and maintain the project well, you have nothing to worry about since a company won't simply hire a bunch of people to fork something and have to pay those people to maintain the code. Simpler to hire people to add features that they need, and have you maintain the code. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
