Re: OFFTOPIC: GTK and alternative GUIs and windowing systems in Linux

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Thu, 12 Feb 1998 17:50:26 +0000 (GMT)

> Well after the court case we can all be sure. Otherwise, I'm still of the opinion
> at the least, it would become a large seathing pile of shit should a GPL author
> try to the reclaim his code, mostly turning out in a mixed result. (Like you can
> freely use the author code before he made the licence change, but can't
> modify it further, etc, etc)

Its not the sort of stuff lawyers generally even bother arguing about. There are
hundreds of years of direct precedent for this, just not all in software. The only
thing that becomes horribly complicated is the

Code released GPL
Someone modifies it
Author releases a non GPL version derived from the modified one
with the modifications apparently rewritten

the question of original work then gets horrible.

Alan

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