Re: Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Simo Sorce <ssorce redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 07:29 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.
> 
> It's possible, but rare for project that has been under the GPL for any 
> length of time. Since there is no requirement to track the copyright 
> ownership of contributers there is generally no way to get permission 
> from all of them for a change.  Of course a dual license could be 
> applied from the start with one being less restrictive like perl's to 
> eliminate that problem.

Such dual licensing would be useless.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York