Proprietary software for Linux

[Mark Wells]

On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 InfoNuovo at cs.com wrote:

> That is, as much as a member of the open-source community might feel
> involved and injured by an alleged breach of the GPL by someone, it strikes
> me that it would be surprising to be given any standing by a court.  To
> pursue a breach of copyright, I'd think you'd pretty much have to be the
> copyright holder to even be heard.  (Other *non-exclusive* licensees might
> make it difficult on the copyright holder for tolerating an apparent breach,
> including defecting from the community around the software at issue, but I
> think there would be little recourse beyond influencing the copyright
> holder.)

This gets more complicated when we consider that most open-source projects
have contributors other than the copyright holder.

Legally these contributors are probably considered to be assigning their
rights to the copyright holder.  If so, do they have any recourse if the
copyright holder fails to enforce the license?  After all, if I contribute
code to a project that's under the GPL, I'm doing it with the
understanding that the GPL will protect my code.  There might be an
implied contract here.

If I'm *not* assigning my rights to the copyright holder, then I'm
licensing my own code under the GPL, and if I can show that any of it made
it into the part of the project that's in dispute, I have standing as a
copyright holder.