Re: [LAD] GPL Violation Alert! - Sorry if this is a duplicate

Hi,

On Tuesday 04 August 2009 22:11:40 you wrote:
> It's a very strange condition I think, and one with countless
> ambiguities: can you reuse code you previously wrote for a completely
> separate open source project but own copyright to?

Actually you can. If you have to copyright, you can re-license your works as
you like. Only you cannot really un-GPL your code after publishing it, you can
only un-GPL future versions.
Unless of course you signed a contract with anyone that gives him an exclusive
license. Which is the default with most/all work-contracts as I pointed out
earlier...

> do you have to
> audit everyone you employ to ensure not only that they own the
> copyright for code they might incorporate, but also that it wasn't
> written when they were using a GPL edition of Qt? what if it's code
> that doesn't itself use Qt but was written as part of an application
> that did? are you legally permitted to use code that someone else not
> associated with your organisation wrote when using the GPL edition and
> then re-licensed to you? what about code within Qt itself that was
> written by someone using the GPL edition and then re-licensed to Qt?
> etc, etc.
> As far as I'm aware there are no reliable answers to questions like
> these, but Nokia persist with the clause (at least I think they do --
> it certainly lasted beyond the shift to LGPL) presumably because
> there's no obvious better way to avoid the situation you describe.
> Companies presumably pay up partly because they like risk even less
> than they like expense.

And maybe they think that Qt is actually pretty good so you can pay them. And
maybe for real programming business the development-only phase is so short
(because of the good Qt-API and documentation) that its not that much money to
pay for the back-dated license. ;-)

Arnold

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