[LAD] Attribution for Community Approval

[Raymond Martin]

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