Re: Copyright assignment

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 14:09 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>> I can not speak for Evolution, but I can speak for Mono, another
>> component that we own the copyright to.
>>
>> We want to keep the copyright for various reasons:
>> 	* We can relicense the code to someone on proprietary terms.
>>	  * It allows us to build proprietary features if we choose to.
>
> This two are reason enough for not wanting to take even a slight look at
> mono.

I'd like to make it clear that, theoretically, if any company ever wanted
to use gtkmm source code in a proprietary project in a way that's
incompatible to the LGPL license [1], I would be more than happy for them
to do that if they paid the appropriate gtkmm developers appropriately for
a proprietary license. I see no problem in that, but I'm not so deeply
idealogical.

I didn't think that free software was meant to take away anybody's
copyright or their right to do what they like with the software that they
wrote. I thought it was meant to free the software, and doing this would
not stop already-freed software from being free.

[1] Of course GTK+ and gtkmm and GNOME libraries can be used without
problems by proprietary applications, because they are LGPL - they just
can't statically link to them or copy their source code. Google if you
want a more accurate description.

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com