On 02/10/2011 05:07 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

[ The different modes of development have already well established
names.   Look up Open Core,  centralized copyright etc)

> note 1: Change of license is only possible if all the contributors agree
> to the change. Even if one disagrees, his work has to be removed before
> the license is changed. Which means that once the number of contributors
> reaches a critical mass, change of license is impossible.

Not really true.   Number of contributors is irrelevant.  What is
important is diversity of copyright holders or the specific permissions
provided by a contributions license agreement if one exists.  MySQL or
Openoffice.org or most of the FSF/GNU projects has a single copyright
holder and that entity can change the license anytime they want to. Also
not all contributions are worthy of copyright. 

> note 2: Although software cannot be stolen or made proprietary (only a
> copy can be stolen or made proprietary), the owner of the copyright can
> sell the copyright (as opposed to selling a copy). But if the number of
> developers has reached a critical mass, selling the copyright is also
> impossible. 

Copyright laws have several major differences depending on which part of
the world we are talking about.  In some places, public domain is not a
legally recognized concept for instance.

Rahul

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