Re: GPL and software I have written
Andrew Sullivan <sullivana@bpl.on.ca> wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 10:43:01AM -0600, John Hasler wrote:
>> Of course he can. Nothing in the GPL forbids charging (and, of course,
>> nothing in the GPL restricts the author in any way).
>
>It's not true that nothing in the GPL restricts the author in any
>way. If an author releases code under the GPL, s/he must either make
>the source available, or change the license. Just because someone is
>the author does not give him/her special rights to violate the
>license.
IANAL, but this sounds nonsensical. The licence is a grant of rights
from the licensor to the licensee, and it's up to the licensor to
enforce it. If the licensor chooses not to abide by the rights that he
has (for the sake of argument) somehow granted to himself, who's there
to argue? And in any case the licensor is unlikely to be a licensee.
Besides, the GPL states (among other things) what you must do when
redistributing the software. It says nothing about what the licensor
must do when distributing the software in the first place, and, since
the licensor does not need to agree with the licence in order to perform
the initial distribution (else how would proprietary
don't-distribute-this-software licences work?), I don't believe it can
say anything about that.
The rather silly effect of distributing sourceless binaries under the
GPL would be that no-one is allowed to distribute them.
Of course, none of this applies if your code is a derived work of
somebody else's GPLed code.
>(Whether a court would uphold that, by acting contrary to the GPL, the
>author was making a _de facto_ change to the license is quite another
>matter, since no-one's ever tested it.)
How could anyone ever test it? :) Is it legally possible to sue
yourself?
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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