On 04/12/2011 12:41 PM, Chris Brennan wrote: [snip]
As to Shawn's response: "per the source of virtualbox - oracle owns it. however, it is all under a gpl type license exept the usb driver which is close source." GPL protect the current incarnation of a project, what's to stop Oracle from release ver5 that *is not* under the GPL licence and the same name?
Depends on how many "external" developers there are and whether The Project can (like the FSF and OOo) get them to assign their copyrights to the Project.
That is, after all, how the FSF was able to do a mass, instantaneous switch to the GPL3 of projects with thousands of contributors.
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