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From: | Anthony W. Youngman |
Subject: | Re: Overview of copyright issues |
Date: | Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:45:30 +0100 |
User-agent: | Turnpike/6.07-M (<UlT6TVT4PTS9G3mvKWV+2+aW63>) |
I don't know whether it's been done, but what if someone has added code into lilypond itself under a compatible licence such as GPLv2+?[1] Where the licensing issue might be important is this: what if someone forks Lilypond and adds a bunch of their own code with a different but compatible license statement -- like GPLv2+? It helps clarify the situation if each file has a specific license statement rather than just relying on 'files should be assumed to be under license X unless otherwise stated'.
(What do you do if, when asking authors what licence they want you to use, they say "v2+" or "v2/v3", not "v2-only"?)
The other motivation is if there _is_ a desire to alter the license it might be useful to be able to do this incrementally, e.g. move to (say) GPL2+ all those files where the authors give permission as soon as that permission is given.
That's moving forward. The thing that concerns me is that, in my (non-lawyer) opinion, if any non-v2-only code HAS made its way into lilypond, it's a GPL violation to stamp a v2-only licence notice on it.
If you want a simple explanation of that, if A grants v2+ to his code, then B gives the code to C saying it's v2-only, firstly B has no right to do that (the GPL says that C gets their licence from A, not B), and secondly the GPL says you can't take away rights granted by the copyright owner. Changing from v2+ to v2-only is such a forbidden change (taking away the recipient's right to change licence).
Cheers, Wol -- Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden
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