On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 07:36:46PM +0530, Philip S Tellis wrote:
it depends on whether framitz is essentially foobar with additions or a totally different project that's borrowed say, once source file from foobar.
In the former case, the copyright remains with the original developers, you hold the copyright on code that you develop. you will own the copyright on framitz, but not on all of its code.
So all I can do is mark my extra code with suitable comments carrying a copyright notice, but I still have to mention the actual copyright holders, right? I guess that is why the first screen for XEmacs includes the copyright notice for FSF among others, although it was forked off quite some time ago.
Another related issue ... when developers contribute code to foobar, do they hand over their rights to the copyright holder for foobar?
The original copyright holders have the right to change the license terms on their work at any time. I assume this cannot have a retrospective effect on the copies that have already been licensed under the GPL. But what happens to all the contributions from other developers? If foobar suddenly becomes propietary, does that mean all the code in foobar can now be used for commercial purposes although it may contain contributions that were encouraged by the original GPL terms?
Sameer.