[News] "Berniethlon" - The End | ANN.lu |
Posted on 01-Dec-2002 18:46 GMT by Gareth Knight (Edited on 2002-12-01 21:44:11 GMT by Christian Kemp) | 221 comments View flat View list |
"It saddens me greatly to announce that, effective today, any of my Amiga-related software development has been mothballed indefinitely. This means that, pending any unexpected developments, there won't be any "Amithlon v2" (aka "Berniethlon"), nor any further support or add ons for "Amithlon v1" by me."
Read more at the Amithlon site
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"Berniethlon" - The End : Comment 81 of 221 | ANN.lu |
Posted by - GALAXY - on 01-Dec-2002 22:52 GMT | In reply to Comment 80 (Hammer): > Q: I would like to release a program I wrote under the GNU GPL, but I would
> like to use the same code in non-free programs.
> A: To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is
> no obstacle to your doing this. If you are the copyright holder for the code, you
> can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times.
Absolutely right, Let's give an example here:
You wrote an Emailing program on your own and you plan to release the sourcecode as opensource using the GPL then you can easily do this. You are the copyright holder of the code.
You can also continue using a 'HAMMER' license on your Emailing program for commercial purposes. You are the copyright holder of that code.
What you can't do is this:
As soon as you released the code under GPL and you get contributions from user A, B, C, D, E, F and 100 of other people for say 1 year (all these people contributed so many patches, fixes and code etc) then you CAN'T grab this code and change the license again without ASKING everyone who contributed to it. These people are responsible that your program got that enchanced as is now with many addons that weren't there previously. If one of these persons don't want his code to be used in a changed license then you need to make sure it's not included. But how can you make sure about it ? The code got so much changed over the year that even the initial patch writer doesn't know about it anymore. How will you make sure that you cleanly removed all the patches out of the code ? To much hassle to much work.
Example, Linus Torvalds would want to make Linux 2.4.21 closed source. I bet he get's his ass raped in first case :) before this ever will going to happen.
The commercial 'Hammer' License version is not affected by this, it depends on your old code and probably got enchanced by your own code over time.
What you can do is:
You realized that your commercial 'Hammer' version of your Email program is far to old and doesn't suit nowadays needs anymore. You can grab the opensource version of your Email program, fork it, add and remove stuff in it and sell it commercially (With the same intentions you had with the 'Hammer' version) but you need to make sure the sourcecode is released as well.
Even your users A, B, C, D, E, F ... and the rest of the world could grab your source without askind anyone for permission (because of the license)... fork it, enchance it, sell it etc.. but they need to provide the sourcecode. |
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