Another related issue ... when developers contribute code to foobar, do they hand over their rights to the copyright holder for foobar?
The original copyright holders have the right to change the license terms on their work at any time. I assume this cannot have a retrospective effect on the copies that have already been licensed under the GPL. But what happens to all the contributions from other developers? If foobar suddenly becomes propietary, does that mean all the code in foobar can now be used for commercial purposes although it may contain contributions that were encouraged by the original GPL terms?
Disclaimer: I'm just guessing. IANAL, I don't know.
If author A writes a program and distributes it under the GPL, and author B contributes to A's program, we have two copyright holders. Now, if A wishes to distribute his program under some other license, he can distribute only the code that he has written. B's contributions are GPL'ed so they can't go with the new, non-GPL license (unless B agrees to it!).
A good case to examine is the Qt library. It's distributed under different licenses, including the GPL. I wonder how they manage this. And, also, is Qt really open source software -- do they accept contributions from people outside of the Qt development team -- if they don't, then is it because it can get them into trouble (because they can't distribute others' contributions under the Qt license).
-Manish
-- Manish Jethani (Technical Staff, Oracle Reports) +91 80 51073488, manish.jethani at oracle.com http://www.geocities.com/manish_jethani/
disclaimer: "The statements and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Oracle Corporation."
--
http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
