dear all, i understand that an author owns the copyright to a software. under this 'ownership' the author may then decide to GPL the software, allowing others more flexible access to the software, under the restrictions imposed by the GPL. This also allows contributors to add their own code or further develop the software. Yet, can the original author choose to un-gpl a software? i have seen some extremely rare instances over the past few years of software that were released under the GPL, and then retracted into a proprietory license.
what happens to the code contributed by other developers who wrote for what to them appeared to be a GPL-ed software then? can the original/initial author, at a later date, choose to release the software under dual, multiple licenses too, such as Apache+GPL, or Apache+GPL+LGPL, or the QT or the staggered Ghostscript kind of license? what happens to the code contributed by others? don't such developers have issues? what if an athor hands over a project to a maintainer, who in conjunction with a larger community generates and gets generated code far in excess of the initial author's offering? can such a community-based project decide at a later date to un-gpl, or gpl++ (with dual or multiple licenses) the software? what if the initial author wishes to do this but the maintainer/community doesn't. or vice-versa? have been googling, but haven't found relevant answers. sidenote: i do remember that staroffice was an opensource project (gpl?) from some german developers, until sun became its "vidhaata" (took ownership? purchased? how?) and forked it as openoffice under GPL, and staroffice under SISL something. how does that work? please enlighten me. thanks in advance. :-) LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
