Stan Shebs wrote:
Jose Garcia-Sancio wrote:
Thats not completely correct. What about all the patches that Sam received
from contributers? He doesn’t have copyright over those codes, so He cant
change the license on those pieces of code.
Things get very murky here. Patches are partly derived code
and partly original, so there’s not a single owner. Also, the
contributor may not have the right to contribute a patch, for
instance when an employer has rights over the code.
If you send Sam a patch, you do implicitly give him the right to
add the patch to HIS sources that HE owns.
The LGPL gives you the right to create your own extended library
(a derivate) where you can add your own copyright stamp. It is
just required that you public-license your derivative work too,
so that a third person can do a derived work, and so on.
If you (the one who did a derivative with a copyright stamp)
never submit your extensions back to Sam, he will not have
the right to include it and license it under non-lgpl terms
to anyone. He may ask you if you would be so kind to allow
him to add the extensions without adding your copyright,
but he couldn’t do more … unless however he adds your
name to the copyright info saying that the library does
contain code from person xxx. In consequence, he would need
to ask all copyright holders if they agree for a special
license on a case by case basis.
In the end, if you have a large block of code (e.g. linux
kernel) that contains a large set of copyright notices
somewhere around, you basically can not achieve anymore
a state to make a special license - it will be bound to
lgpl forever, even for the original author. The original
author could try to strip out all code sections that do
not belong to him, but that’s often not a feasible idea.
So long as all files in the sdl tarball bear his and only
his copyright, he can license the thing to whoever he
wishes under whatever terms he likes. If there are other
copyrights in the tarball, he would need to ask everyone,
or let it be as is: let all Loki games be dynamically
linked to the sdl-lib. After all, since it is lgpl,
there is no problem for Loki (or Sam) anyway - no
claims to see the application code that simply uses
the libsdl seperatly.
cheers,
– guido
P.S. opensource programmers tend to merge a project with its
offspring projects, but that makes for two copyright holders
implicitly. If the FSF likes to be in tightfisted control of
the code, they can be an^H^H^H^H^H insist on an extra
agreement, but actually they are just cautious about the
quirks of US copyright legislation which is really weird
(seen from the european side of the atlantic)
31:GCS/E/S/P C++$++++ ULHS L++w- N++@ d(±) s+a- h.r(*@)>+++ y++ 5++X-
