Re: [LAU] Is LS licensed? (was: [LAA] [ANN] gigedit 0.1.0)

On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 21:23 +0100, Keith Sharp wrote:
> But, I am not sure that your observation that because the copyright
> holders of LS and libgig are the same they can distribute is completely
> correct. As you note the copyright holder can distribute the software
> under whatever terms they choose, but I see two problems with the
> LS/libgig situation:
>
> 1) No one else can distribute LS binaries under its current licence
> because they would be in breach of the GPL licence on libgig.
>
> 2) I have doubts about whether a copyright holder can distribute
> binaries licenced under the GPL that are in breach of the GPL. the
> penalty for breaching the GPL is that the licence is removed and the
> software cannot be distributed.

A copyright licence is a licence, not a contract. It can only grant
additional rights to the ones you are already given under your copyright
law, not remove any of them. In virtually every country the copyright
holder can do whatever he or she wants with his or her own work, and
releasing it under a licence that grants additional rights to others can
never change that.

1) is a fair point though.

> I am not even an amateur lawyer so this is getting way beyond me! It
> would be nice to have it settled once and for all either LS is
> re-licenced under a standard GPL compatible FOSS licence, or someone
> asks the FSF for an opinion. The latter might be the nuclear option -
> the FSF opinion might cause the LS developers to stop distributing the
> software and walk away :-(

They could not do that. The only thing they could do would be to tell
the LS hackers to stop calling their licence GPL if it isn't GPL, and
remove all references to GNU and the FSF from it.

Also, the FSF may have written the GPL, but that does not mean that
their opinion about what it means matters more than anyone else's -
especially when it's used for software that is not a part of the GNU
project.

--ll

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