Robin Winning <[email protected]> writes: > Hi All, > I am a contracts manager at software company, and in addition to doing > contracts, I now find myself reviewing the licenses associated with > the open source packages my company has acquired. I have become quite > familiar with the GPL/LGPL/AGPL suite of licenses, as well as the > other, permissive licenses: MIT, BSD, etc. Here's my question: quite > frequently, the programmer makes the Free Software Foundation the > copyright holder, but then attaches a license that is not in the GPL > family. Is that a valid combination? >
It can be, yes. Some packages whose copyrights are held by the FSF are distributed under other licenses. There is actually no intrinsic connection between the GPL and the FSF holding the copyright or vice versa. However, it is not valid for someone to just say "Copyright Free Software Foundation" on their code without actually having a conversation with us about it (although we appreciate the sentiment). :) We don't actually hold the copyright unless the author has signed an agreement with us transferring it. If you write to [email protected] with more information about the code, we can confirm whether we actually hold the copyright. -john -- John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at <http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=8096>. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
