Jim Starkey wrote:

> At 12:25 PM 7/20/00 -0600, Tim Uckun wrote:
> >
> >
> >This seems weird to me. I seriously doubt that once a code is GPLed it can
> >be un GPLed. The purpose of GPL is to prevent just that. I suppose they
> >could have two forks for the code base a pre and a post GPL and they hope
> >to sell the pre GPL fork but this seems like a dicey business plan.
> >
>
> The more interesting question is what they do about user contributions
> to the source code. A patch to a GPL project is automatically GPLed.
> If they apply the patch to non-GPL tree, it instantly falls under
> GPL itself.
>

Cygnus (now owned by Redhat) own the copyright to the gcc C compiler and they
would always get you to assign copyright of any mods over to them (otherwise
they wouldn't take them).

This allowed them to in addition to releaseing a GPL version to do proprietry
mods and sell the modified gcc to some of their customers.

Linux on the other had has so many contributors that I remember from somewhere
"it would be imposible to untangle to a single copyright holder".



Mark