Re: [linux-audio-dev] Tracktion, JUCE and Linux

On Wednesday 27 Apr 2005 15:19, Arnold Krille wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 April 2005 15:44, Alfons Adriaensen wrote:
> > Q. Suppose I write something and transfer copyright to you,
> > as required for your project. Can I then still release the same
> > code under the GPL ?

No.

> > I'd guess not, since I gave up my rights to it.

Right.

> Thats the difference between the copyright (as in copy) and the
> ownership. This is clearly parted in the german law at least and
> called Urheberrecht vs. Verwertungsrechte.

I think Urheberrecht (copyright) is what Julian is asking contributors
to assign to him. Verwertungsrechte (commercial rights) essentially
correspond to licensing arrangements in the US legal world, I believe,
and they aren't at issue here. I don't know whether you can reassign
copyright in Germany, but you can in the UK and USA.

My view is that what Julian's suggesting is perfectly ethical -- he's
inviting people to contribute to a project that will after all be under
the GPL, and he's perfectly upfront about the commercial exploitation
angle -- but practically problematic. It's fine for projects in which
you aren't soliciting any contribution bigger than the odd bugfix, but
if people might be contributing significant amounts of code (and n.b. I
don't know how much work is needed for the Linux audio parts of JUCE)
then the problems raised in this thread (not being able to then reuse
your own code, for example, or to contribute anything derived from an
existing GPL codebase) are probably significant for most potential
contributors.

I assume there are substantial reasons not to license the library under
the LGPL, such as the fact that a commercial rival could then use it in
their own proprietary products.

One practical idea might be to suggest that authors of big contributions
could (as an alternative to assigning copyright) retain their copyright
but license it under a very permissive licence such as the BSD one.
Then Julian and Mackie would be free to use it in any commercial
product (provided the copyright was acknowledged), and the original
author and others would be free to reuse or relicense it. There would
be little fear of other third parties reusing the code in other
proprietary products, if it was functionally specific to the GPL'd JUCE
library.

I imagine that arrangement would be more appealing to most potential
contributors of large amounts of work. I certainly wouldn't mind it
myself, whereas I probably would be put off by assigning copyright for
anything bigger than a bugfix.

Chris
Received on Thu Apr 28 00:15:07 2005