On 05/04/2010 05:53 PM, Peter Seebach wrote:
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...
No, fortunately not.
1) The copyright assignment to the FSF includes granting back the right
to relicense your contributions under any license. So you do have the
right to relicense those under a non-copyleft or proprietary license,
for example. Of course, this is only true as long as you're the sole
contribution. For example, I maintain GNU Smalltalk: I could relicense
some parts of it (e.g. the sockets library that I wrote), but not the
entirety of the virtual machine (which has multiple contributors).
2) Even then, the last version before the relicensing would be still
available as LGPLv2+. So the FSF has to balance the (perceived)
advantages of upgrading the license with the (perceived) likelihood and
disadvantages of a fork.
Alfred, please do not chime in the middle of a discussion without
apparently understanding the context and with a partial answer.
Paolo
