There's the other issue that Foo 1.0 can exist under multiple licenses. You *could* re-assign the BSD or another license to Foo 1.0 and use that when working with another entity (whether that is public or not). That doesn't change the fact that Foo 1.0 also exists under the GPL so that may give other people other rights. You'd have to go do contract law to see which licenses would apply to entities that may be crosslicensed. Josh __SIG__ On Sun, 24 Jun 2001 peter.clark at tides.com wrote: > --Jason DeStafano wrote--- > I'm thinking about releasing some software I've written > and using the GPL. My question is if I release it under the > GPL and say 6 months down the road I've made some > new enhancements and a company wants to buy the software > from me. Can I (as the author) stop using the GPL on a new > release and thus sell it to someone an intellectual property > (and thus discontinue making updates). In other words, does > the GPL forever premit even myself from selling my own > GPL'ed software? > --- > First, the usual IANAL disclaimer. However, this discussion seems to > come up a lot, and general concensus is as follows: > Let's say that you release software FooBar v1.0 under the GPL. Then > along comes BigSoftware that wants to add some features to it. As the > developer, you can change the license of future derivations, so you > decide that Foobar v2.0 (Foobar v1.0 + new features) will be > proprietary. That's legit. *HOWEVER*, FooBar 1.0 is still GPL and cannot > be changed. Thus, someone is free to come along and take the source for > v1.0, add the same functionality that was included in v2.0, and release > the new code as FreeFoo under the GPL. > If I am not mistaken, this is what happened with ssh. The author > originally licensed it under the GPL, but then licensed future versions > as proprietary. Along came another programmer, took the existing GPL'd > code and added the same functionality, and thus OpenSSH was born. > Same story with the CDDB database. It was originally open, but then > someone got greedy, decided to form a company (Gracenote) around it, and > closed it off. People were more than a little ticked that something that > they had developed (submitting music info) was now closed, took the last > open information and formed FreeDB. > Note that there is nothing about the GPL that forbids you from > selling GPL'd software. RMS used to sell Emacs for $150, I think. It's > just a little harder. > Someone correct me if I am wrong. > :Peter > > _______________________________________________ > tclug-list mailing list > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >