Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:29:51AM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:Where did you pick that one up? Can you show me the wording ANYWHERE that supports that statement?
I'll explain. The GPL expressly forbids you to create any derived work that is not GPL itself.
[some nitpicking follows]
The work cannot "be" GPL; it must be licensed under the terms of the GPL, but this license doesn't have to be exclusive.
You're free to license your derived work under any license you want, restrictive as it may be, as long as you *also* license it under the terms of the GPL.
That statement is incorrect, pure and simple.
If you wrote a piece of code, and licensed it under the GPL, and I create derived work, the GPL is the only license with which I can distribute my derived work. Anything else will be violating your copyright.
That is not an academic distinction; quite a few companies make their living upon it (offering various products under commercial licenses as well as the GPL, with the commercial license offering additional benefits for the client).No company does that. At least, none that I know of. I think you are mistaking dual licensing and relicensing.
MySQL AB, TrollTech, Sun (for OpenOffice) and AOL (for Mozilla) offer dual licensing. This means that they take code FOR WHICH THEY ARE THE SOLE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS and license them under two licenses, one of which is the GPL. This comes at a cost, however. If you want your code to be integrated into OpenOffice, you have to assign the copyright for your code to Sun, otherwise THEY ARE NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISTRIBUTE IT IN THEIR CLOSED PRODUCT.
I repeat - you can do the trick you mention only if you get consent for it from all copyright holders. Otherwise, if any copyright holder only gives you the GPL as a license, everything must be GPL.
Additionally, you're free to *create* a derived work and not offer it to anyone under the GPL, as long as you're not publishing it under a different license. That's also not an academic distinction; it applies to all software developed for in-house use.That is true, and is a result of the GPL wording (and meaning, mind you). The GPL only requires you to give the sources to those parties you gave the binaries to. This is not a mistake, and is an intended consequence. When Stallman was in Israel I asked him to give an example of a license accepted by the Open Source Initiative that he does not consider free. He gave one of Apple's licenses, that require you to publish any change you make to the program, and explained that it was going too far for his taste.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. http://www.lingnu.com/
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