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I wasn’t asking in this scenario but in general if a game company was forced to retroactively license a game under the GPL

by gfodor 6y ago

klyrs 6y ago
Note: this comment is written under the assumption that Nintendo included GPL'd code, which doesn't appear to be the case. But this is an interesting hypothetical either way. The answers here are in line with my (NAL) understanding of the issue: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/331846/dual-license-with-gpl-and-a-closed-source-license https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3318... If the Nintendo-authored derivatives of Dr. Mario are free of external GPL code; more generally, if they are the sole copyright holders of those derivatives -- they may release them (or not) under any license they like. For instance, you're welcome to release a work under GPL, and maintain a proprietary patchset that you release only in binary form. But, at the moment that you incorporate code/content written by external contributors under the GPL license, you cannot incorporate that into your proprietary version. While Nintendo may not be compelled to release derivatives, it is my (NAL) understanding that the gzip authors would have a very strong case to a very expensive discovery process which would provide them very broad access to Nintendo's game source code. While I don't think that all of the revealed code would enter public record, some of it would inevitably be entered as evidence. There's another fun case worthy of consideration: if you are the sole author of some body of code, and you contribute that code to a GPL-licensed project (but do not assign copyright to that project), you retain full rights to the original code. You may, at a later date, license the original form of that code to an employer for proprietary use, or to another project using an incompatible license. And this is a great use of version control software -- you must not include later improvements to that code that was made by others; and the repo provides excellent historical evidence.

I wasn’t asking in this scenario but in general if a game company was forced to retroactively license a game under the GPL

by gfodor 6y ago

I wasn’t asking in this scenario but in general if a game company was forced to retroactively license a game under the GPL

klyrs 6y ago

Note: this comment is written under the assumption that Nintendo included GPL'd code, which doesn't appear to be the case. But this is an interesting hypothetical either way. The answers here are in line with my (NAL) understanding of the issue: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/331846/dual-license-with-gpl-and-a-closed-source-license https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3318... If the Nintendo-authored derivatives of Dr. Mario are free of external GPL code; more generally, if they are the sole copyright holders of those derivatives -- they may release them (or not) under any license they like. For instance, you're welcome to release a work under GPL, and maintain a proprietary patchset that you release only in binary form. But, at the moment that you incorporate code/content written by external contributors under the GPL license, you cannot incorporate that into your proprietary version. While Nintendo may not be compelled to release derivatives, it is my (NAL) understanding that the gzip authors would have a very strong case to a very expensive discovery process which would provide them very broad access to Nintendo's game source code. While I don't think that all of the revealed code would enter public record, some of it would inevitably be entered as evidence. There's another fun case worthy of consideration: if you are the sole author of some body of code, and you contribute that code to a GPL-licensed project (but do not assign copyright to that project), you retain full rights to the original code. You may, at a later date, license the original form of that code to an employer for proprietary use, or to another project using an incompatible license. And this is a great use of version control software -- you must not include later improvements to that code that was made by others; and the repo provides excellent historical evidence.