4 Aug
2009
4 Aug
'09
6:34 p.m.
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