Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Mon Jun 30 12:26:13 UTC 2008


Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 11:25 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Perhaps there are places who want to prevent better versions than their 
>>> own from ever being available and use this to justify the GPL 
>>> restrictions on combinations with other components.  From a user's 
>>> perspective, though, this is just as harmful as any other 
>>> anti-competitive ploy to limit choices.  And unfortunately, even if the 
>>> business reasons to maintain the restrictions on a particular product go 
>>> away, the restrictions, once applied, never do.
>> That's factually incorrect. Relicensing, dual or even tri licensing 
>> happens all the time.
> 
> Well, sometimes.  Arranging for retroactive relicensing of existing
> projects is often problematic, particularly when there are numerous,
> widely distributed developers, or when the developers are unreachable or
> unwilling to consider it.

That makes "never" factually incorrect. You are agreeing with my point. 
Besides large projects such as Mozilla, gstreamer and others have 
managed retroactive relicensing. So it is certainly possible although 
possibly difficult in some cases.

Rahul




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