[GNUz] Moving ...

[Jim Cheetham]

On Oct 15, 2005, at 9:33 AM, rik-Xandros-test wrote:
>> That could be the IDS system Nessus
>> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/06/1853248&tid=172&tid=117
> Is that "/exploiting a loophole in the GPL/" or just plain 
> unscrupulous?

Neither, by a long shot.
The company owned the copyright, and therefore have the right to 
license under any terms they liked.

Despite being GPLd, the community had not submitted any significant 
patches or functionality, and therefore the code was not jointly owned. 
This meant that no-one else had to be consulted about the license 
change.

Contrast with the Linux kernel - there are so many copyright holders 
involved in that collection of code, any relicensing would have to get 
agreement from every single one of them (even the ones that are 
uncontactable). This is seen as a level of protection, because Linus 
cannot "go bad" without rewriting huge portions.

On the other hand, it will probably prevent the kernel from moving to 
GPLv3, for the same reasons ...

-jim