Subject: Re: help! absolute beginner From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/12/19 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3123014884919222@naggum.no> * Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | The GPL is supposed to change the society -- its creator hasn't kept that | a secret. Is that why you call the FSF and their followers a "protest | movement"? hey, I'm all for changing society, but there's fighting _for_ something and there's fighting _against_ something. it's a hell of a lot easier to get people to agree on what they don't want and fight against it, and maybe you succeed in defeating it, but then what do you do? that's a protest movement. in contrast, if you fight _for_ something, you never really have that question. (the worst you can do to anyone is to fulfill all their dreams.) | It is my understanding that the owner of the code can always relicense | their code under a different license, thus making it eligible for the | recipient's purposes. I'm concerned with what this would mean. if there is a public license and a private license for the same code, the two can never really be merged, so there would have to be a very firm split at the time when the two different licenses were created, perhaps to be glued together by the owner of the source. considering the fact that one of these are in the open, that must mean the other is precluded from any form of publication, and is also barred from adopting changes to the same source made under the GPL. this is very different from what the case would be if the GPL'ed version did not exist. in the usual understanding of "relicense", such dependence is not an issue, since neither licenses grant anything to the entire public, but lets the owner retain control over it, and would presumably preclude conflicts of interests and conflicting licenses for the same people. it is, therefore, my understanding that once GPL'ed, it has to be retracted and only later developments may be relicensed. I'm not sure how this would be done in practice and ensured to be fully available as a legal option. I'd like to hear about people who have done this before I would speculate on how it would actually be done. #:Erik -- Attention, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee! We have intercepted a coded transmission from Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein that puts your life in jeopardy. Clinton is prepared to cease fire if all of you are killed by Iraqi terrorists, whom he won't prosecute. Be warned!