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Re: License violation in "new" Plex86



On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 11:02:51PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> The main author of Plex86 forked his own project (heh) to create the "new"
> Plex86 effort, and relicensed it under the MIT/X license. He asserted that,
> as the copyright holder, he has permission to do so.
> 
> But Plex86 included many contributions of different developers under the LGPL.
> In order to relicense, he'd need either to have permission from each of the
> copyright holders of the old Plex86 project, or remove/replace the code for
> which he doesn't own the copyright.

For what it's worth, there have been a lot of vague mumblings about authors
of "joint works" being able to license the work without requiring permission
from other authors.  However, I've yet to see confirmation of this from a
copyright lawyer, and I'm not aware of any major project actually doing this.
(I suppose it would be against the FSF's interests to confirm this, since it
loosens the GPL's "hold" somewhat.)  If anyone has a competent source on this
as it relates to free software, though, I'd be interested in it.

-- 
Glenn Maynard



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