On Monday, February 07, 2011 11:46:08 Bernardo Barros wrote:
2011/2/7 Yaro Kasear <yaro@marupa.net>:
Sure you can change licenses if you own (Hold copyright to.) all the relevant code involved.
That's way OT, but I'm curious now... :-).
Well, it was in response to a reply in this thread a coupe days ago. It was on topic them... sort of.
Then if I did a BSD code that a company used in their proprietary code, and then I change it to GPL, what happens then? The company will have to open their derivative code too?
Well, that depends. Assuming the company made no contributions to the code that they have copyright over, from what I understand, the upstream maintainer can still relicense it and the company using it is SOL for any NEW versions of the software. But, also, from what I understand, NOTHING legally bars the company from forking the last BSD version of the code and making that proprietary as the BSD license already allows such a thing so long as copyright notices remain intact. Now, whether this would be a GOOD thing is subjective. If a lot of people counted on my code being open source, but none of them made any copyright- worthy contributions to the code and it remains 100% mine, I could go from GPL to proprietary... but it would, frankly, be absolutely scummy. But again, they could fork the last GPL'd version. From what I understand, this is part of why open source is unstoppable. A company can't just buy out an open source project, relicense it as proprietary or shut down its development, and expect it to go away. (This is why I think people are overreacting to Oracle a bit.)
What I see is people releasing prior proprietary code unde GPL, but not from BSD to GPL.
Also, I'm not an expert, but I think a bit reason this transition is rare is because the general attitude of those who use the BSD license is that they have less of a care about what happens with their code so long as they are still the upstream people in charge of it. You can make proprietary software from BSD code, and most BSD-licensing authors don't mind. But, legally, nothing stops them from MAKING it GPL later so long as it is 100% their copyright. This is likely also aggravated by the fact that it's VERY hard to make an open source project WITHOUT at least two other people putting in their own code that, yes, they do own all by themselves. Thus, Linus PRRROBABLY won't ever be able to relicense the Linux kernel, ever, as there are just way too many different copyright holders to way too many different bits of the Linux kernel. Even more "frustrating" to this is that the GPL prohibits changing to an incompatible license if other parts of the code are GPL, so Linus can change what he has copyright over in the kernel ONLY to something GPL-compatible. It's complicated, and its messy, and its far from perfect. The GPL has some wonderful bits mixed with some not-so-great bits. Demanding "compatibility" in the GPL is one of its not-so-wonderful bits. Keep in mind, this is how I have managed to interpret copyright law under the Berne Convention. You automatically have copyright on any works of your own, but if more than one person has copyright in the end, it's no longer just your decision to make decisions on the general license of the work. The great thing aout open source licenses, though, is that you don't have to worry about making changes to other people's work and sending it out to the world. However, I did point out some time ago that just because you make changes and distribute doesn't mean the upstream maintainer will approve of them and use them. This is open source, an amalgam of different skills, tastes, personalities, and ugly code (And we all do have ugly code in some way or another.).