Hello Peter, * Peter Seebach wrote on Tue, May 04, 2010 at 05:53:56PM CEST: > In message <e1o9kpn-0005yp...@fencepost.gnu.org>, "Alfred M. Szmidt" writes: > >If the FSF is the copyright holder, then there is no (legal) need to > >ask the original author about permission to relicense the work. It > >might be a nice thing to do, but if the original author says no for > >some reason, the FSF can still relicense the work; they are the > >copyright holders. > > And for that matter, it seems that at that point, the original author > doesn't have the right to just keep a copy under the terms under which > they intended to release it... Thus the issue. (It turns out that > GPLv3 is pretty deeply problematic for me; it turns out that I'd rather > just let people like TiVO play stupid games than have to deal with v3.)
This is not right, on two accounts. First, the FSF copyright assignment grants you back certain rights that allow you to use code that you wrote in whichever way you want, including in proprietary programs. The other point is that gnulib usually lets the author of a module have a say over the license used for it (under some side conditions, of course). You've already been told that LGPLv2+ was fine for gnulib, and I don't see why that shouldn't work for everyone. Cheers, Ralf
