decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more... 		decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

You won't find me on Facebook

Donate

Donate Paypal

No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.

What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments

Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
How to unGPL GPLed software. | 136 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
How to unGPL GPLed software.
Authored by: myNym on Friday, December 14 2012 @ 07:30 AM EST
If you own the copyrights to the whole work by virtue of
having written it all, then you can license future versions of
it however you like.

Previous versions that are GPL can of course be forked.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How to unGPL GPLed software.
Authored by: macrorodent on Friday, December 14 2012 @ 07:33 AM EST
How can you close source a GPLed product?

If you own all copyrights, you can say that from certain version onwards, the code is no longer under GPL. You cannot do anything about those versions already released under GPL. Also, if there are contributions by other people, and they have not assigned the rights to you and do not agree with your license change, you cannot do it without entirely removing those contributions.

This kind of thing has happened with some projects, and if the software matters to many people, the result is usually a GPL'd and often renamed fork of the code, based on the last GPL'd version. If not enough people care, the project typically withers after the license change...

(Ob.Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. The above is just my understanding, based on years of observing going-ons in the F/OSS world. Hire a lawyer if the answer matters).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How to unGPL GPLed software.
Authored by: MadTom1999 on Friday, December 14 2012 @ 07:35 AM EST
You can add on stuff that is not statically linked with the GPL'ed stuff and
release that under whatever license is available for that.
You cannot change the license on the GPL'ed stuff already released, but if you
wrote it you can change the license on that but not revoke the license on stuff
already in the public domain.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details ) 		Site layout based on Woodlands theme by Bryan Bell.
Groklaw logo by John Crowley.
News Picks logo by Ted Thompson.
Powered By GeekLog
Created this page in 0.03 seconds