3 Jul
2006
3 Jul
'06
10:22 p.m.
On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 05:55:11PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
both guesses are wrong. i think it will be precise
enough to say that a
company expressed what appeared to be a serious interest in leveraging
the existence of LS for its own plans. relationships changed between the
various parties, and the LS developers were left in a situation where
work they had already done might be used in ways they did not consent
to. Meanwhile, the company felt that it was the LS developers who had
failed to follow through on the agreement. i don't think its feasible to
be more precise than this.
the core point of the story is that you cannot stop other organizations
from making use of your GPL-licensed work even if you have entered into
some different kind of arrangement with them. for some people, this
represents a serious issue.
Licensing software under the GPL is giving others consent to use that
software commercially in certain ways. If there was an additional
agreement with this specific company that they would not use it in some
of those ways, it still wouldn't stop other companies who haven't signed
that additional agreement to use the software in whatever way was
granted to them under the GPL. What confuses me is why the authors of
the software chose to release the code under the GPL and also didn't (as
it seems) want to consent to others using the software in some of the
ways granted by the GPL. Do I have the wrong picture? (maybe I do, I am
just going on the little information provided above.)
--
Ryan Heise
http://www.ryanheise.com/