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Re: GPL Liscensing on New Release: What Gives?
>
> > the GPL is now also being used to protect commercial interests [2].
>
> Greetings,
>
> I am not very good at economics/law matters. Could you explain how the GPL is protecting
> commercial interests?
>
Jay Lepreau is preparing a FAQ for this, but in brief this situation is
as follows:
It is important to distinguish between copyright ownership and the
act of licensing code.
The copyright holder of a piece of code, that is, the owner, can
release that piece of code under as many licenses as he or she wants.
One of these licenses may be the GPL. It's the freedom of the owner
to decide.
Because of the restrictions associated with the GPL, namely its
contamination clause, releasing code under the GPL will prevent
law-abiding citizens (and non-citizens, for that matter) from
including the code in closed-source products, which most commercial
products still are.
People interested in including the code in commercial, closed-source
products have the possibility of negotiating other licensing conditions
with the copyright owner. In other words, they can buy the right to
include the code in their products without falling victim to GPL's
contamination.
Hence, the GPL protects the interests and intellectual property rights of
the copyright holder: not by preventing others from seeing or using the code,
but by restricting other people's freedom to include the code into their
products without having paid for it, if those products are of the
traditional closed-source kind.
Clearly, it does not provide full protection in that it does not prevent
others from including (and possibly selling) the code in GPLed products
they may offer.
As an aside, this is different from what the FSF requires developers
of GNU projects to do: they require those developers to assign their
copyright to the FSF, preventing them from doing what I just described.
I'm not an expert either, but I hope that helps.
- Godmar
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