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Re: License violation in "new" Plex86



Glenn Maynard wrote:

> 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.
Even if true, it doesn't apply to "derivative works"; it would apply to
cases where two people, together, wrote the work jointly, at one time --
not to a case where one person edited the preexisting work of another
person.  (Of course, that's a really fuzzy line.)

>  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.
> 

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