Changing the licensing terms for an application

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sat, Jun 15, 2002, Karsten M. Self (kmself at ix.netcom.com) wrote:
> on Thu, Jun 13, 2002, Hanxue Lee (feilongquan at myrealbox.com) wrote:
> > I wish to know whether I can change the licensing term of an application
> > from GNU GPL to BSD or vice versa.
> > 
> > For example, the original progam is licensed using BSD license. I
> > found out that some unscruplous developers are adding some new
> > features and re-selling it without contributing back to the source
> > tree. 
> 
> Note that you're largely explicitly permitting this in using the BSD
> license.  Partisans of the GNU GPL will note this as a flaw of the BSD
> license; partisans of BSD-style licensing note this as a key feature.
> You have to decide if it's what you want.  It seems that it isn't.

Following up on the explicit point of lacking back-contributions.  There
are no FSF Free Software licenses which mandate this, and the one OSI
Open Source license I'm aware of, the APSL, is harshly condemned (and
the OSI widely criticised for having approved the license) for
*requiring* code revisions be submitted to the original author.

What you buy with the GPL is that there will be no proprietary forks of
your software.  It's entirely possible that a free-software fork might
be made (many say this is an advantage of these licenses -- they obviate
yet another potential lock-in situation).  If the fork is structured
properly, it's quite possible that nobody but the forkee and their
direct downstream licensees would ever see the source.

I'd strongly suggest you revisit your goals, plans, and aims in free
software licensing, and evaluate how various licenses fit these needs.
I don't believe you'll find what you're asking for in _any_ commonly
used, widely accepted, approved, license.

IANAL, TINLA, YADA.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
   Kernels don't "grow" unless you compiled with the CHIA_PET option in
   your configure file perhaps.
    -- M. Schubert in misc at openbsd.org
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