[plug] [article] Open Code Market (OCM)

[Cameron Patrick]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 05:30:47PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:

| For example: without the GPL, authors would be able to exclusively
| licence their computer programmes, or "software" ;-), or allow their
| work to be used in a non-free manner. I am lead to believe that the
| GPL does not guarantee authors would have that flexibility (or that
| such flexibility would be incompatible with the GPL).

No, not /exclusively/ in a non-free manner, because they have already
licensed their work in a free manner.

| You said "The GPL restricts the licensing of any derivative works". That
| is what I meant by "The GPL restricts the licensing of your code".

Ahh.  You're welcome to either not license your code as GPL and not
write stuff based on GPL'ed code if you don't like the GPL's
restrictions.  If you do want to touch GPLed code you have to keep to
the conditions under which it's been licensed to you---just like any
other software licence, in fact.

In other words, I'm not actually disagreeing with what you claim you
meant to say :-)  I just think that saying an unqualified "The GPL
restricts the licensing of your code" is at best misleading and easily
interpreted as something which is incorrect.

| > You're welcome to license your additions to GPL'ed software under some
| > other licence.
| 
| Under *particular* other licences that will all the conditions of the
| GPL to be imposed.

No, you can distribute /your/ code under any licence you like.  The
resulting binary (containing your code and the GPL'ed code) can only
be distributed in certain circumstances, though.

| Exactly. You could not exercise flexibilities that would be allowed by
| the "other" licence if that flexibility is not provided by the GPL,
| because your 'addition' will be used as part of a GPL-licensed whole.
| Even if you can use your addition outside of a GPL-licensed whole, your
| prior distribution under the GPL license may inhibit this (to get around
| this, you may have to re-license your work! ow!).

I don't dispute this.

| > People license their work under the GPL because they want their work to
| > /remain/ open, no matter what some chap called James on the other side
| > of the world wants to do to it :-)
| 
| Agreed (coming back to my point that the GPL sacrifices freedom for
| openness).

Fair enough.  I obviously just don't perceive this as being a problem in
the way that you seem to.

Cheers,

Cameron.


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