Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: GPL terms

Author:bslesins@best.com
Posted:8/31/2000; 8:44:28 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/28/2000
Msg #:20643 (In response to 20641)
Prev/Next:20642 / 20644

No - you can do whatever you like because your company owns the copyright. However, if someone else builds some software that uses the Applet Toolkit, and they haven't contacted you to negotiate better terms, then they have to release their application under GPL (or else they can take the GPL code back out again). This makes GPL a good idea for companies that don't want to allow competitors to use their code.

However, it gets more complicated once you start collaborating with other developers. If someone contributes code to MacBird, you could't use their contributions in commercial products under the terms of the GPL unless you contact the author to get additional rights to it. (In large GPLed projects, it becomes difficult to convert to a different license because there are so many contributors, and you have to contact everyone and get agreement from them, and it's often not clear who owns what.)

So for code that is used in commercial products that's truly a collaborative effort, it's probably better to use a license like the one the XFree86 project uses.

(I am not a lawyer, etc, etc.)

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