On Sunday 20 May 2007, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2007, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: GPL Issue":
> > Consider: if I modify your buggy GPLed program I automatically[1] hold
> > the copyright to my changes. I cannot release them under any license
> > than GPL, nor do I agree to any other license. It stands to reason
> > that you will have to ask me, as a copyright holder, before releasing
> > the program, including my modifications, under another license. You
> > can release the code to which you hold the copyright (without my
> > modifications) under a different license.
>
> I don't think the situation is as clear-cut as this. It is obvious that
> I create a free software project, let other people help and half of the
> code ends up to be code contributed by other people, then I don't have the
> right to relicense the complete project without asking everyone else.
Not entirely accurate. If the program you created was explicitly licensed
under a BSD-style licence and the other contributions were contributed under
this licence, then you, or anyone can easily change the licence to something
else without asking anyone. The original code before the re-licensing remains
as is, but there can be a code under a different licence (free or otherwise).
> But what if I wrote 90% of the code? What about 99% of the code, with other
> people just sending one-line bug fixes, not new features?
>
> When someone sends you a patch for your free software project, without
> stating anything about copyright, what does that mean? Is he keeping his
> copyright and only letting you use it in the GPL software, or is he
> basically saying to you "hey, thanks for writing this software; I want to
> help you, so take this patch, no strings attached"? Perhaps some other
> variables, like the size of the patch (one line bug fix, vs. 1000 lines of
> a new feature), the development structure of the project (one main
> developer who get sent patches, vs. many developers cooperating in
> Subversion), and so on, play a role in deciding which interpretation makes
> sense?
>
> Of course, it's always safest to make things explicit. Large American free
> software organizations, like the FSF and the ASF, have gone as far as
> having with written forms and beurocracies which you need to fill before
> you're allowed to make large scale code contributions to them. But even
> those organizations don't apply the same level of beurocracy to small
> contributions: when you send a relatively-small patch to a GNU or Apache
> project, a maintainer just accepts it from you and applies it. It is
> implied that you do NOT retain your copyright on that contribution - rather
> the FSF or ASF does. If the FSF decides to release all its code one day
> using the GPL 3, nobody is going to ask me whether I agree that they do
> that with the bug-fix patch I contributed to Gzip a few years ago.
Actually, if your code ownership was retained by you, but was made under the
GPL version 2 or later, then the Free Software Foundation can decide to make
it GPL version 2 alone, GPLv3 or later, GPLv3 alone, etc. That because your
code is essentially multi-licensed under the GPL 2 or future versions of it.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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