At 19:26 -0700 26/5/03, Phil Nelson wrote:
Nope, the original authors can do so too.
It depends on who owns the copyright, FSF or the original authors. In many cases the author assigned copyright to the FSF and than can no longer change the license unless they send a formal letter to the FSF asking for their own copy of the software or document to do with as they see fit. And FSF still owns the copyright on the FSF copy.
Well, at least according to the message I just received regarding the copyright assignment for GPC:
Below I am sending to you a form that you can fill out and send to fsf-records@gnu.org, so they can do some paperwork with you which is necessary to keep the copyright of GNU Pascal clean. This procedure does not affect your own rights on the code you wrote, but it enables the FSF to enforce the software license (GNU GPL) in case this becomes ever necessary.
So according to that, it does not affect my rights to the stuff I write, which means I can proceed to release it under a different license (you can then get it under either license). This is the same as when I release my changes as Public Domain and they are incorporated in to GPC under the GPL - you can get the code as part of GPC and use it legally with the GPL restrictions, or you can get the code (I wrote) "from the Public Domain" and use it without restrictions, at your choice.
I have not yet seen the FSF's assignment, so I can't say for sure until I read it, but it it certainly possible that the assignment is an assignment to the FSF of rigths, but not of ownership.
After I read the document, I'll report further.
Enjoy, Peter. PS: Just for the record, I'm a professional software author making my living selling proprietary software (previously shareware, now buy before you try commercial electronic distribution). I'd be happy to release my source code, but not at the expense of my living, and I have not seen any way to do that (making it open source but still proprietary would be unlikely to work, especially since that would allow removal of serial number protection which has been shown to dramatically increase sales). I enjoy working on open source projects, but I'm not a big fan of the FSF or GPL and I don't believe Open Source is economically viable on a large scale - currently the Open Source community gets a lot of support from companies and programmers who make their living selling proprietary software. But all of this is just me and my biases so folks know where I am coming from - if anyone wants to discus any of this, I'm happy to do so off the list.