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

Re: The GPL is not open source.

Author:Jeremy Bowers
Posted:8/23/2000; 3:15:56 PM
Topic:Next survey: Are you an open source developer?
Msg #:20007 (In response to 19999)
Prev/Next:20006 / 20008

>>The GPL doesn't tell you what you can do with your software--it tells you what you can do with somebody else's software.

>Alas, not true. It forces you to forfeit any hope of making money from your own efforts.

Not entirely correct. GPL does not and can not "impose" constraints on the original copyright holder, because it is not possible to constrain the original copyright holder. Licenses only constrain others.

You can multi-license, putting out one version in GPL and holding another back. You can work on each of those forks seperately, or perhaps just release something like, say, a 5-year-old game called Doom (from iD software).

This assumes that either "you" (be "you" corporation or single indepedent developer) are the sole copyright holder, or that you can obtain permission from every current copyright holder (and write around anybody's code who you can't find) to change or add a license. While it has been done, it can be difficult. The only thing the copyright holder(s) can't do is call the code back that's already GPL'ed... but that would be unethical anyhow.

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