Re: Thoughts about gnuplot license and copyrights

[Dave D. <dde...@es...>]

Timoth=E9e Lecomte <tim...@en...> writes:

> I'm not a desperate fan of the gpl, but I think that this license
> handles these problems (maintainship by a self-defined community) in a
> good way, by preserving to a good extent the spirit of the original
> gnuplot license (preserving from usurpation, keeping the modified and
> published code as open as the original).

Actually, I'm not sure it does.... it almost defines that the
software has *no* owner, and therefore it is impossible to distinguish
the "real" version of the software from a forked version.

> Release of modified code is allowed, is easy. Fortunately it is not
> allowed without any restriction. Here are those restrictions (quote from
> the gpl) :

Is there anything in the GPL that allows "the maintainers" to release
a new version of "their own" software without exactly the same
restrictions applying to them ?

eg picking gnugo completely at random. (Not because I think it has
anything dodgy in its history. Merely because it's one GPL product I
have contributed code to in the not-too-distant past.)

On some day in the past, there was a software product called
"gnugo 3.4" released. There is a group of people around who consider
themselves to be "the maintainers of gnugo". They added some code to
gnugo 3.4, producing a derived work. They released this and called it
"gnugo 3.6".

I'm not sure that the GPL gives this people the right to reuse the
name "gnugo" for their version, as opposed to anyone else.

Changing only the version number must be sufficient notice that
changes have been made, since that's usually all a maintainer will do
when they release new versions.

A colleague here (not a lawyer...) reports that this does come up from
time to time and that, sometimes, people do indeed release
unauthorized forks of gpl code, changing only the version number, and
passing their version off as a new release.



dd
--=20
Dave Denholm              <dde...@es...>       http://www.esmertec=
.com