Re: IglooFTP goes commercial. Violation of GPL?
On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Carl Mummert wrote:
> AFAIK, the person who owns the copyright on the work is free
> to change that copyright as the code goes on.
> [deletia]
> The KDE people had this problem for a while, too. Their license
> required Qt to be gpl'ed, but qt wasn't, so no-one else could
> follow the license terms. But the owners were free to violate
> them because no one could force them to follow their own license.
Strictly speaking, they weren't violating a licence either. A licence is the
authority given to someone *by the copyright holder* to use their code.
A copyright holder can do what they like with their code. When someone
releases code under the GPL, they are restricting what other people can do
with their code, not what they themselves do with it.
----
Robert King, Australian Environmental Studies, Griffith University, Australia
3875 6677 Robert.King@mailbox.gu.edu.au http://www.ens.gu.edu.au/robertk/
"This library is open one hour each fortnight. No book shall leave these
premises. We have sworn it with an oath!"
-- Library of King Ashurbanipal, Babylon, ca. 3000 BC.
Reply to: