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What are your thoughts about copyright assignment? Is your current employer willing to contribute code to something like a foundation and assign copyright to t
by minot 11y ago
What are your thoughts about copyright assignment?
Is your current employer willing to contribute code to something like a foundation and assign copyright to them with the code licensed under AGPL?
If not, is your current employer willing to pay a certain amount to the aforementioned foundation get a proprietary perpetual, non-revocable, transferable blah blah license for a one time payment of... let's say $50k?
What I'm asking essentially is:
Is your company willing to help develop something like Ghostscript either by a. writing code for ghostscript to make it better or b. giving them money to make ghostscript better?
Even if both the answers are no, perhaps this module can act on its own and you can just never modify the source code. I believe as long as you don't modify the source code and just use binaries provided by upstream, all you'd have to do is to provide the binaries and the source files that you got from upstream.
I don't see why corporations have to be anti-GPL.
- tjr 11y agoFrom what I have witnessed in industry: It would probably be immensely helpful if the GPL software developers who were open to alternate licensing schemes explicitly said so on their web pages. Otherwise the only licensing option listed for their software is GPL. It's a minor point, granted, but I think it would make a difference. EDIT: e.g., a statement like, This software is licensed to the public under GPLv3. If you would like to use this software under different licensing terms, please email us / review our price sheet / etc.
- dalke 11y agoBut isn't that true of nearly every other license and vendor? Which developers are open to relicensing their proprietary software under the GPL, and if so, for how much? If the price is right, then perhaps enough people will contribute and free the software, which could also make a difference.
- tjr 11y agoSure, well, I wrote that in the context of, if any GPL software developers want their software to be used more in a non-copyleft setting and are willing to negotiate a difference license. It very well could work both ways; some proprietary software developer would likely be willing to release their software as GPL if paid enough money, since, ostensibly, the proprietary license was chosen to help make money in the first place. I can imagine that some proprietary software developers choose proprietary licensing for some other reason, but I suspect it's mostly the default for anyone looking to charge for copies.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- minot 11y agoSorry, I am not trying to put your current employer in a bad light. My apologies. I am not trying to give you answers. I am just wondering if there are ways we could benefit from free software in other ways.
- chc 11y agoBut this changes if we're talking about things that look more like libraries rather than standalone executables, because the GPL is of the opinion that if you call something as an executable, that's fine, but if you call into a library, your whole codebase has caught the GPL fever.