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tjrHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2

I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.

Original discussionThe Free Software Foundation is dying221 source comments · at import
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SH
shortrounddevHN

> We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. The present leadership, particularly from RMS, creates an exclusionary environment in a place where inclusion and representation are important for the success of the movement. I'm not a fan of RMS, but this is the exact kind of left wing platitude that people think will revive an organization, but really just signals thats the organization is more concerned with the appearance of reform, rather than substance. It is the death rattle of an organization which has allowed itself to become ideological rather than pragmatic (which is funny considering how ideological the FSF is) The problem with FSF is that it either hasn't made its point clear, or has failed to convince people. People are naturally turned off by the GPL because they do not want to give their company's code away; they see it as a risk to their b…

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SH
shortrounddevHN

No idea how they did it; nobody ever sued us over it. We did continue to distribute some source to our clients, but not GPL. It may have been a kind of LGPL or something, and then V3 and V4 of the product simply imported the V2 as a library to build on top of

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dale_glassHN

> Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent. It works perfectly fine if you own the copyright to all your code. You can't relicense somebody else's code of course, but you can relicense your own. So a company that develops something in-house and then slaps the GPL on the public release can change their mind on the license for future releases all they like. It only gets tricky if they accepted external contributions. In which case there's often a contributor agreement, in which the contributor agree the company can relicense the contributed code.

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