James Weatherall wrote:
That's true. I was only pushing the envelope to show how ridiculous his claims were and how generous you already are. I beleive that if you took the same sources, licensed them under a different license (which is within your rights.) and produced and distibuted only binaries under that licenese you wouldn't be failing to honour the GPL. It's your's to do what you want with. That's the only redeeming quality of the GPL.Kyle,
If we release binaries under the GPL then we have to honour the license's requirements to make the source code to those binaries available, in the same way as anyone else does, which we do. If we didn't do that, we'd be failing to honour the license under which we'd distributed the software.
It's also the case that if even one of the binaries we distribute is GPL andI can see that, if you choose to license that binary under the GPL then you must choose to license the others that way too if they are distributed together.
it's distributed alongside other binaries then they must be GPL licensed
too, even if the entire thing is owned by us.
However I still maintain (not that you'd do it, this is an academic brainstornm after all...) that there's nothing stopping you from releasing them under a different license which allows the source to be omitted. You can change the license at any time.
This was done (as I understand it by Ghostscript for ages.) Each new version was released without sources and non-gpl'd for paying customers only. Once a new version was ready to replace it, then the sources and binaries were made available for the previous version under the GPL.
Note, I'm not claiming that you can change the rights of anyone who recieved the sources under the GPL once they have them. Those rights you've granted forever. But you could stop granting thos rights to people who get the software from you in the future. Of course they can just go get the source from someone who got it before you changed the license so I don't know what'd you'd gain.
The fact that we own VNC simply means that we can release binaries underI aggree, but if all the software is software you're the copyright holder of, then you can change the license so that none of it is GPL. and then bundel it however you wish. (Again purely academically speaking.)
other licensing terms if we wish. It doesn't allow us to bundle
GPL-licensed software with software under other licenses.
-Kyle _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [email protected] To remove yourself from the list visit: http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
