if you have to give out an unlimited, royalty free license to your work, I think it's not unfair to say that you have given up your copyright protection. As the copyright holder, it's true that you can relicense it to suit other licenses, but it's not clear to me that you can clearly make a copyright infringment case if there is an LGPLed copy in the public.
Well if somebody uses my work in a way either not permitted by LGPL or explicitly permited by me through some other license I can't see why I can't sue.
But the point I'm trying to make is that I can be in violation of your RELICENSE. I can make a claim that YOUR work is covered by the *GPL, so that your RElicense to me doesn't apply. If this holds, then my original statement that you gave up your copyright protection holds.
I'm not sure I follow you.
Yes, if my work is covered by *GPL, you can ALWAYS use it if you follow the conditions in the license.
However if you for some reason can't or won't, you can ask me for a relicense. If you don't I can sue you for violating the *GPL. If you do, you have to follow the conditions of the new license otherwise I can sue you.
Of course, if you later decide that oh well following the *GPL is not that bad in comparison after all, it is possible and even probably that I can't sue you for breaking the relicense as long as you follow the *GPL.
The point it that you must show that you follow either *GPL or my relicense in order to not be a copyright infringer. You don't have to follow both though.
Patrik Stridvall wrote:
But the point I'm trying to make is that I can be in violation of your RELICENSE. I can make a claim that YOUR work is covered by the *GPL, so that your RElicense to me doesn't apply. If this holds, then my original statement that you gave up your copyright protection holds.
I'm not sure I follow you.
Yes, if my work is covered by *GPL, you can ALWAYS use it if you follow the conditions in the license.
yes, even if it contradicts your relicense. If you "work on" an *GPLed product, what you do is automatically claimed by *GPL, thus you can't make any license on your work that is *GPL free.
Of course, if you later decide that oh well following the *GPL is not that bad in comparison after all, it is possible and even probably that I can't sue you for breaking the relicense as long as you follow the *GPL.
and if your are relying on your copyright protection to allow you to benefit on the relicense, you don't have it in this case. Remember also that the *GPL is pretty much irrelevent so long as you are not distributing to the public, so it's not a great cost to choose to go that route.
The point it that you must show that you follow either *GPL or my relicense in order to not be a copyright infringer. You don't have to follow both though.
It's a little different, because I think the burden of proof is different. Pending on the what you have in your relicense, it's easy to show that the receiver is covered because they have the software. On a GPL violation, you have to show that what they are doing with the software is in violation of the license - which might be much harder to show.
-r
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Patrik Stridvall -
Roger Fujii