On 3/14/06, Steven H. McCown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That's the common sense answer. However, it is the ability to arbitrarily > change licenses that makes the atty's nervous. There's good reason, too, > since 'free' software is making people tons of $$$ -- and facilitating lots > of litigation.
Facilitating lots of litigation? Are you confusing "free software" with "software patents"? > It's not so much about who can change 1 file's license. What it is about is > that Linux (or other software) has/will have some collateral files that may > be GPL'd under v3. When you put all of that together in a system that will > be called "Linux version X", the question is what does that do the 'overall' > Linux license? I don't think that I've ever seen an end-user-purchasable > package that comes with multiple, conflicting licenses. Has anyone? Anyone who creates code is free to take that code and then license it under multiple licenses (assuming the licenses don't say something like 'you can't license code under this license if you've already licensed the same code under some other license'). Some licenses (e.g. GPL) prevent taking the already-licensed project and re-licensing it, which effectively forks your project. Nothing prevents you from contributing the 'same' changes to both projects going forward (that I know of). MySQL has done this: http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/ > There are several things at odds between GPL v2 and v3. The Linux *kernel* > (but *only* the kernel, according to Linus) won't migrate to GPL v3, since > there are provisions that prohibit DRM of all things. Stallman and Torvalds > have a philosophical difference of opinion on this... Linus is only the leader for the kernel and a few, small, kernel-related projects. So, of course he can't speak for anyone else. There are packages available for _my_ distribution of linux (gentoo) under 812 separate and distinct licenses. ~ Nathan _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
