"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What bothers me is releasing a buggy, low function program ONLY as > GPL, and soliciting people to contribute fixes and upgrades with the > clearly stated promise that the code will remain GPL (free). > > Then someone comes along and offers big bucks, so the same code is > now released as version 2, with a dual commercial/GPL license. > > In one case the people who did contribute code were not offered any > compensation for their work, nor were they allowed to have their > work removed from the nonGPL version.
Geoff, IANAL, but if you know someone who did this they are clearly in violation, and you will be right to be bothered by this, and you may - and should - report it. 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. If you wrote version 1, and I contributed to version 2, then you can release version 1 under a non-GPL license, but you cannot do this with version 2 without my explicit permission. And I may want my share of profit or revenue. Another, legal, possibility is as follows: you can enter into a contract - and get paid, of course - to modify version 2, and you may *agree* not to distribute *your modifications* until your client (or employer as a special case) gives you an OK. They may never give you an OK, though *they* have the right to distribute the whole thing under GPL (and only under GPL). This may be regarded by purists as suboptimal, because your (presumably useful) modifications will not be released to the public. On the other hand, the decision lies with your client (who paid the bucks), and not with you. Other copyright holders for the original version 2 don't get any of the bucks, but you were specifically paid for your modifications, not for the work they did. Granted, your modifications would not have a right to exist without their work, but in this respect it is no different from charging money for providing FOSS support, regarded as kosher by the consensus. [1] In most countries, and provided it is not "work for hire". -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
