Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Joseph Wakeling 
<address@hidden> writes
> [1] Where the licensing issue might be important is this: what if
> someone forks Lilypond and adds a bunch of their own code with a
> different but compatible license statement -- like GPLv2+?  It helps
> clarify the situation if each file has a specific license statement
> rather than just relying on 'files should be assumed to be under license
> X unless otherwise stated'.
I don't know whether it's been done, but what if someone has added code 
into lilypond itself under a compatible licence such as GPLv2+?

(What do you do if, when asking authors what licence they want you to 
use, they say "v2+" or "v2/v3", not "v2-only"?)

> The other motivation is if there _is_ a desire to alter the license it
> might be useful to be able to do this incrementally, e.g. move to (say)
> GPL2+ all those files where the authors give permission as soon as that
> permission is given.

That's moving forward. The thing that concerns me is that, in my 
(non-lawyer) opinion, if any non-v2-only code HAS made its way into 
lilypond, it's a GPL violation to stamp a v2-only licence notice on it.

If you want a simple explanation of that, if A grants v2+ to his code, 
then B gives the code to C saying it's v2-only, firstly B has no right 
to do that (the GPL says that C gets their licence from A, not B), and 
secondly the GPL says you can't take away rights granted by the 
copyright owner. Changing from v2+ to v2-only is such a forbidden change 
(taking away the recipient's right to change licence).

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden