On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 05:55:11PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote: > both guesses are wrong. i think it will be precise enough to say that a > company expressed what appeared to be a serious interest in leveraging > the existence of LS for its own plans. relationships changed between the > various parties, and the LS developers were left in a situation where > work they had already done might be used in ways they did not consent > to. Meanwhile, the company felt that it was the LS developers who had > failed to follow through on the agreement. i don't think its feasible to > be more precise than this. > > the core point of the story is that you cannot stop other organizations > from making use of your GPL-licensed work even if you have entered into > some different kind of arrangement with them. for some people, this > represents a serious issue.
Licensing software under the GPL is giving others consent to use that software commercially in certain ways. If there was an additional agreement with this specific company that they would not use it in some of those ways, it still wouldn't stop other companies who haven't signed that additional agreement to use the software in whatever way was granted to them under the GPL. What confuses me is why the authors of the software chose to release the code under the GPL and also didn't (as it seems) want to consent to others using the software in some of the ways granted by the GPL. Do I have the wrong picture? (maybe I do, I am just going on the little information provided above.) -- Ryan Heise http://www.ryanheise.com/
