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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:34:31 +0930

Re: GPL question

On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 05:09:40PM +0930, Mark Newton wrote:
> 
> For people who *aren't* licensees, though, the situation is different
> again.  If a piece of software which used to be published under the GPL
> is now published under different terms, new users can't fall-back onto 
> the GPL because they never agreed to use the software under those terms
> in the first place.
> 
> So:  If you publish software under the GPL, and then change your mind
> and use a different license, you create three classes of people:
> 
>    (a) people using your software under GPL terms, who chose not to adopt
>        the new license terms;
> 
>    (b) people using the new license terms because they decided to terminate
>        their agreement under the GPL;  and
> 
>    (c) people using the new license terms because they've never had the
>        option of agreeing to use the software under the GPL, because they
>        received it after the date when you decided that you weren't going
>        to offer GPL terms anymore.


Mark,

This is sort of covered by the GPL FAQ at this point:

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html#CanDeveloperThirdParty

There's a real difficulty here because of the way the Internet
works. Because you don't go to the premises of the author
and obtain your copy of the software personally and shake hands
on it or sign a licence personally, it's difficult to know just
when the licensee has actually received the software - before or
after the stop of issuing of the old licence.

Suppose I get hold of a an old linux distribution disk and
click to accept the licence a year after that licence has
been superseded. Is that still a valid licence?
If not, then clicking to accept the licence has no meaning.
You really have to phone up and ask if the licence is
still on offer.

Once the software+licence is out there in the wild, surely
anyone who accepts the licence may use the software as
indicated. I.e. licensing is nowadays an asynchronous process.

If you wrote a song and put it in the public domain, you wouldn't
expect that the people who haven't seen the sheet music yet
woudl be forbidden from using it for free just because you
have issued a new (or same) version with a licence fee
indicated on it. They could still get a public domain
copy from someone else and copy it.
The GPL does say that you can distribute the software
in perpetuity - even to people who had not accepted the licence
before the issuing of the new licence terms.

As long as I get my copy of the software from someone who _did_
accept the terms, I should be fine.

So I don't think that in practice there are any such people
as you describe in (c), unless they are physically isolated
from all copies of the software-with-old-licence.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

<soapbox>
PS. I used to be strongly against the GPL, but now I'm becoming
more and more positive towards it, as I can see that
commercial licensing rarely gives significant benefits to
creative authors. Generally, I find that creative authors
get as much benefit out of the software they write for
their employers as musicians get from having their music
published, or novelists get from their works being published.
Most musicians or novelists support themselves with a
day job, or else they starve for their art.
So the right to charge a big fee for software usually makes
big money for the employers or others, but not for the
creative people behind it, who are generally regarded as
little more than the creative equivalent of bricklayers by
software houses and entrepreneurs.
The marketers and distributors think that they are the
real geniuses. And most of them can't even spell the word "genius".
</soapbox>

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