updating the GPL's status in http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category ?

[Chris Travers]

2010/1/20 Björn Terelius <bjorn.terelius at gmail.com>:

> Thats horrible! If the courts would uphold this (regarding software),
> it would completely undermine the the open source licenses.
> Someone could for example make a contribution (however insignificant)
> to an GPLed project and then relicense the work under a more permissive
> license.

I am not the damage would be as great as you fear.  First of all truly
insignificant contributions might not meet de minimis copyright
criteria anyway, and courts might have a lot of options including
defining works to be much smaller than the whole kernel.  I am not
sure why someone making a minor but non-trivial change to a Linux
iscsi driver would have a right to misappropriate, say, the XFS
filesystem module from the same kernel.

The questions of what constitutes derivation, however, are more likely
to be GPL-unfriendly (consider that a "derivative work" in copyright
law was intended to define how one novel might be derivative of
another, or how one movie might be derivative of a book).

Furthermore, the cultural controls which bolster open source software
are really pretty strong.  Abusing the spirit of a license would not
be good business.

>
> By the way, what happens after every line of code in that contribution is
> removed? Would he still have an equal share in the work?

I thought this was addressed in SCO v. IBM and the answer was "no" and
that one had to show specific linkages to a SPECIFIC work, not to some
endless inferences of derivation (just because C is derived from B and
B is derived from A does not necessarily mean that C is derived from
A).  I would expect the same approach to apply to authorship as well,
but IANAL.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers