Jeff Wandling W7BRS wrote:
The way for him to solve the problem is to make the source GPL'd.
There's a fair number of technical people on this list who would be able
to patch his code to make it work.
Everyone benefits, including him by being able to sell the improved code
base with the premium features obtained by paying the fee. He wouldn't
lose a dime*
Unless people voluntarily assign it to him, he would not own the
copyright in any modifications, so he would not be able to sell
copyright licences (or the actual copyright). He can still sell the
service of putting it onto media, or otherwise distributing, and for
support, but anyone else would be free to do so.
He could also use changes to understand where problems lie, and make his
own changes to fix the problems, but would need to be careful to avoid
any accusation of copying. He would still own the copyright in his
original work, and could licence it, or derivatives of it, under any
licence he likes, in parallel with the GPL.
(Exception: trivial and obvious changes cannot be copyrighted. I
believe the Free Software Foundation (FSF) uses four changed as the
measure of what is trivial.)
This is not to say that using the GPL would be a bad idea, just that one
needs to understand the limitations.
Note: the FSF believe that assigning copyright requires a formal
contract, and make a token payment (USD 1) for copyrights assigned to
them. Assigning means transferring ownership of the intellectual
property, losing ones own rights in it.
--
David Woolley
"The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to
Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio"
List Guidelines <http://www.elecraft.com/elecraft_list_guidelines.htm>
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