31 Jan
2011
31 Jan
'11
6:24 p.m.
On January 31, 2011 11:37:42 am drew Roberts wrote:
On Saturday 29 January 2011 18:59:32 Jeremy Salwen
wrote:
> > Anyway that is the reason I delete the "or any later" term in my
> > copyright notices. Apart from the fact that one can never know whether
> > gpl4 will give all the rights exclusively to microsoft or google or the
> > nsa...
I do not know why anybody would think this is even possible. The GPL is
written by the Free Software Foundation. So being free is a foundational goal
and the past 30 years and evolution of the licenses have shown this to be the
case. Perhaps you should go and read their mission statement and about the
history of all this before saying things like that.
It is almost an impossible scenario since the license is clearly about keeping
software free for anyone to use, develop, distribute, in accord with the
license. It is logical to deduce that anything besides that would be
contradictory to its intent, and possibly cancel any power of enforcement that
the license carries.
In fact there is no way for FSF to sign over any rights you have in the code
you write. You always have the right to take your original code and put it out
under a different license, free or proprietary. If anything towards what you
suggested were to occur developers would just up and put their code out under
different licenses. After all the work the FSF has put into these licenses I am
certain they have examined many scenarios and possible outcomes of changing
the license in one way or another.
There is really nothing to fear in using the GPL.
Raymond