Re: Opera in your repos
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 11:44:00PM +0200, Ilya Shpan'kov wrote:
> I will inform our lawers about your opinion. Really, it have a very big
> sense.
>
> I can say, that here in Opera we had discussions about being Free
> Software every year. Unfortunately, we have a lot of agreements with
> other companies which use Opera at their devices - by this case we still
> can't to be a real free Software.
If you mean you are using 3rd party code which is licensed to you under
proprietary terms - there is not much you can do I guess.
If you mean you and your partners rely on commercial exploitation of
(some of) the features of Opera - there is always the possibility of
dual-licensing the code to GPL/Proprietary together with forced
copyright assignments (so Opera retains control of the general direction
and can relicense/exploit the code). This way, no other company can
exploit the code in a proprietary way (or has to disclose their
modifications) while Opera still can (as the code owner through the
alternative proprietary license).
Whether you attract a lot of outside developers this way (due to truely
free alternatives like Webkit and Gecko) is a different matter, of
course.
regards,
Michael
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