Simon Large wrote:
> "Only the copyright holders for the program can legally authorize
> this exception. If you wrote the whole program yourself, then
> assuming your employer or school does not claim the copyright, you
> are the copyright holder--so you can authorize the exception. But if
> you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors
> in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them. You have
> to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs."
>
> That means that if we continue to use the GPL, then any time we need
> to add in something which has an incompatible license, we have to go
> around all the contributors to ask them if it is OK. Admittedly at
> this stage of the project we are not likely to make significant major
> additions, but that is not guaranteed. For example, I don't know if
> the Microsoft Eula on GRETA is compatible, and that is a very recent
> addition to TSVN.
IANAL, but I think the example exception text at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs is just
that, an example.
Where it says
"[additionally grant permission to use <Program>]... with code included
in the standard release of DEF under the XYZ license"
It could instead say:
"[additionally grant permission to use <Program>]... with code included
in the standard release of libraries listed with their respective
licences in in 3rdPartyLibraries.txt, included with this distribution"
So contributors only need to once agree that their code can be used with
3rdParty libs included at E.g. Stefan's discretion. This does weaken
the whole GPL business somewhat, but still is better than nothing, IMO.
Personally, I'm much more comfortable and inclined to contribute to a
GPL'd project because there's more assurance that when we all give, we
get back. SlimyEnterprises can't add in two nifty features (only 1% of
the work compared to everyone else's) and start selling TortoiseSVN++
without contributing those nifty-feature changes back. (I think this is
also what Stefan was saying, in
http://svn.haxx.se/tsvn/archive-2004-12/0495.shtml)
-Nathan
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Received on Fri Aug 19 19:22:02 2005