Travis Crump wrote: > Colin Watson wrote: > >That of course doesn't prevent the holders of LAME's copyright from > >releasing it under the GPL, since the copyright holders are not > >themselves bound by the terms of the licence, > > Why shouldn't they be bound by the terms of the licence? Because they did not receive it under the license, obviously. > As copyright > holders they are perfectly able to distribute under whatever other > license they want, but if they decide to release under a license than it > seems like they should be just as obligated to fullfill all the parts of > the license as anyone else. No, because they are the authority that grants the license, not a member of the set of people to whom the license is granted. > This is why 'commercial' 'open' source > licenses such as the NPL make pains to explicitly exclude themselves > from license obligations. The GPL doesn't include any such exemptions. I've never read the NPL, so I may be wrong about this, but from what I've heard about it, it seems to me that the point of that is to exempt Netscape from obligations with regard to code contributed by outsiders who received the code under NPL. So if you take some Mozilla code and enhance it, you are bound by the NPL, but Netscape can take your enhancements and use them however they like. This is completely separate from what you're talking about. Craig
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