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I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by sell
by tjr 4y ago
I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work
Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.
- shortrounddev 4y agoNo idea how they did it; nobody ever sued us over it. We did continue to distribute some source to our clients, but not GPL. It may have been a kind of LGPL or something, and then V3 and V4 of the product simply imported the V2 as a library to build on top of
- dale_glass 4y ago> Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent. It works perfectly fine if you own the copyright to all your code. You can't relicense somebody else's code of course, but you can relicense your own. So a company that develops something in-house and then slaps the GPL on the public release can change their mind on the license for future releases all they like. It only gets tricky if they accepted external contributions. In which case there's often a contributor agreement, in which the contributor agree the company can relicense the contributed code.
- tjr 4y agoYou are correct, of course. I was writing in the context of the above story, but I failed to clearly express that. I should have written, "Updating someone else's GPL code ..." Thank you.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]