Re: IglooFTP goes commercial. Violation of GPL?
On Wed, Jul 28, 1999 at 02:02:38AM -0400, Paul D. Smith wrote
> %% Carl Mummert <mummert@cs.wcu.edu> writes:
>
> cm> Who owns patches?
>
> The person who wrote it always "owns" it... sort of. The patch can be
> argued to be a derived work of the original, so in a sense the author
> might not own it entirely.
>
> cm> When a patch is integrated into the main product, doesn't the new
> cm> code incorporated from the patch become property of the original
> cm> owner?
>
> No. The main product now becomes a derived work of both authors.
> That's the easy answer. The more complex answer is only a court could
> ultimately decide it, and they may take into consideration various
> factors such as the size of the patch, importance to the whole, etc.
>
The patch has to be "significant" and "creative" enough to merit
protection in its own right; for instance, if someone noticed that
the original author was passing the wrong argument to a system call
and corrected the apparent error that probably *wouldn't* be considered
worthy of protection, and wouldn't have any effect on the ownership
of the patched source.
>[snip]
IANAL,
John P.
--
huiac@camtech.net.au
john@huiac.apana.org.au
"Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
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