[Sussex] GPL and copyright

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Wed, 6 July, 2005 16:41, Geoffrey Teale said:
> If you give someone else the copyright it is not yours to license.  You

IANAL, but if the license predates the copyright transfer I think you'd be
ok (unless you screwed up and gave them enough rights to revoke your
license)

> That said the point that the FSF might make subtle changes to their use of
> the code is a valid one.  Do as you feel best.

Indeed, I wasn't meaning to suggest the FSF is going to go evil - I do
feel that's pretty unlikely too ;)

I'm also a little concerned that it might lead to wild forking if a lot of
people object to some future version for some reason currently unimagined.
It's quite interesting how much code is already under "or later" revisions
- from my unscientific sampling I'd say it's most GPL'd code. If code is
easily portable between versions of the GPL then this won't be a problem,
but that could be difficult if they need to correct and protect against a
hole. Licenses are too complicated ;(

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net