Clarification of GPL

[John Cowan]

Mahesh T. Pai scripsit:

> If you  do not  like assigning copyright  to the original  author, you
> are free  to create  your own fork  by adding your  modifications, and
> distribute the whole  thing yourselves. People did it  to GNU Emacs by
> creating Xemacs.

You are indeed free to do this, but it rarely happens and is generally
considered a Bad Thing.  Forks which remain split and where both
branches have substantial life are very few:  GNU Emacs/XEmacs, bison/byacc,
FreeBSD/NetBSD, NetBSD/OpenBSD.

-- 
John Cowan                              jcowan at reutershealth.com
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory
that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
        --blurb for _Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi_
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3