OT: Who's governed by GPL? (Was: GPL and software I have written)
On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 05:39:40PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> Andrew Sullivan <sullivana@bpl.on.ca> wrote:
> >It's not true that nothing in the GPL restricts the author in any
> >way.
> 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.
I'm no lawyer, either, so it's not like I speak with legal authority
here. In any case, I should have been clearer. It does seem in the
initial case, the licensor is not a licensee, and clearly needn't
abide by any terms at all. But the GPL does not talk only about
re-distribution: it "applies to any program or other work which
contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be
distributed under the terms of this General Public License."
Accordingly, the original distributer is also bound by the license.
That distributor could, at his/her option, relicense the code,
however, because s/he holds the copyright on the code. It's
copyright law which comes to bear here: the copyright owner can do
whatever s/he wants with the code. But if the copyright owner does
not comply in any way with the GPL -- such as distributing the source
code -- then one could argue either that s/he is in violation of
the license, or that s/he never did license under the GPL.
Of course, this all seems like a lot of wanking, unless one considers
the case of people who want to figure out a way to make money from
"Open Source". One answer is to say, "It's under the GPL," and just
never release the source. Because the number of companies with a
so-called open Source strategy is currently small enough, this sort
of nonsense doesn't go on: it's just a PR nightmare that no-one
wants. But if more end users became enamoured of Free software, they
would start to look for the magic letters GPL. I can imagine a
clever marketdroid somewhere noticing the potential paradox here, and
thinking, "Hey, we could call it GPL and just never release it." In
fact, one has sometimes found oneself wondering whether that isn't
the precise strategy in a couple of cases. (Heck, who needs the
maybe-trademark Open Source, when you can put "GPL" on the web site
instead?)
> >(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?
Interested parties in a trust could sue the trust. Imagine where a
trust held the copyright on a program that many people had worked on,
then ejected a programmer from the trust. Essentially, the dispute
would come down to a brach of contract, with the programmer arguing
that the contract was supposed to be governed by the GPL. I'm not
suggesting it will happen, just that it's not impossible. Stranger
things have happened under what passes for the justice system.
Again, though, I'm not a lawyer, so no-one should take my word for
it.
And since this has drifted rather far off-topic, maybe someone can
suggest a place for any followups?
A
--
Andrew Sullivan Computer Services
<sullivana@bpl.on.ca> Burlington Public Library
+1 905 639 3611 x158 2331 New Street
Burlington, Ontario, Canada L7R 1J4
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