[darcs-users] Re: how to redistribute darcs+Eclipse

[Jamie Webb]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 02:17:45PM +0200, Ketil Malde wrote:
> > The maintainer has already given you permission to make and distribute
> > patches under the GPL. See section 2.
> 
> "provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
>   [..]
>     b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
>     whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
>     part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
>     parties under the terms of this License."

Yes, your patches must also be GPLed.

> Any copyright holder may refuse to licence a particular derived work
> with a particular license.

In the absense of a previous agreement to the contrary. But the GPL
specifically grants contributors the right to release derived works
under the GPL, and once granted that right cannot be revoked except as
set out in the license, or by mutual agreement. A license is a two-way
agreement. It cannot be changed unilaterally, unless the license makes
provision for that, which the GPL purposely doesn't.

To be clear, having released code under the GPL, the author is free to
/also/ license it commercially or under any other license, but once
that version has been licensed to people under the GPL, those people
are free to do whatever the GPL allows them, and the author no longer
has any right to stop them.

> (This is all quite pedantic, and clearly in violation of the spirit of
> the GPL, of course.  Probably it is also plain wrong :-)

A specific design goal of the GPL was to ensure that a program could
always be forked if necessary. Assuming the GPL is legally valid at
all, rest assured that a project can always be forked.

There are numerous examples of GPLed projects which have gone
proprietary, only to find themselves competing with an open source
project based on the last GPLed release of their own code, for example
the software behind SourceForge.

-- Jamie Webb