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

Re: That would be public domain

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:9/10/2000; 12:28:38 PM
Topic:Guido and Richard
Msg #:21115 (In response to 21091)
Prev/Next:21114 / 21116

How would you feel if you released the source code to a product and it was rebranded and sold commercially for real money with nothing other than cosmetic (logo) changes?

It depends. The FreeBSD developers would be delighted, but Linus Torvals would get quite annoyed.

But there are actually three separate issues here:

The GPL allows the first two, but prohibits the third. For example, RedHat can take a GPL'd window manager, add their logo in several different places, and sell the resulting code as part of RedHat Linux. There's nothing illegal about this.

But here's the catch: A user of RedHat Linux is allowed to remove all those silly logos and to redistribute the original window manager without permission from RedHat.

So there's a happy balance, and nobody gets especially upset. But if RedHat were to add a more restrictive license to the window manager (or an enhanced version thereof), that would be a no-no, and people would get annoyed.

On the other hand, if the window manager used the XFree86 (or new BSD) license, then RedHat could make a proprietary version.

Does this make sense?

Cheers,
Eric

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:36 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.