Copyright versus Licenses

Dominick Samperi a ?crit :

Interesting, but what about the situation where a new author adds his name
as copyright holder without the
consent of the original copyright holder, and with only one person making
the decision whether or not this
change is warranted: the new copyright holder? Doesn't this amount to giving
the copyright away, or
giving it away to everybody?

If someone writes some code in a file, he is entitled to be the 
copyright owner of what he wrote. Kicking him away means not using his 
changes.

GPL is often called copyleft for a reason: it basically cancels most of the
rights that you would have with
an ordinary copyright so that others can freely copy your work with no
requirements other than that your

Nope. You cannot "cancel" your rights. You have them. Full stop.

You just give enough rights to other fellows. And restrictions when it 
comes to distributing GPL stuff. Essentially.

You are not taking your rights away from and giving them to others. That 
doesn't make sense.

The only "infringement" cases that I am aware of is where a company is sued
because it tried to turn
GPL software into a commercial product. This is what GPL was designed to do.

Nope. GPL allows you to make commercial GPL products. So you cannot say 
that it forbids turning GPL work into a commercial product.

And there are cases where ISP have been 'distributing' GPL code in the 
routers, ADSL boxes. They've been sued for not disclosing the source 
code. They haven't been sued for shipping GPL code in these ADSL boxes 
in the scope of a commercial contract. Quite the opposite.

It is not designed
to protect authors (because that would be an attack on software freedom and
apple pie, according to
true believers).

It is designed to protect people receiving software from vendors who may 
want to conceal the source code of what they're distributing. Among 
other things.

But, for instance, if your code may be hijacked by a big corporation, 
putting it under the GPL is a guarantee that it doesn't make huge sense 
to hijack it. So here you protect the author.

But how is this R related?

All the best,

Guillaume Yziquel
http://yziquel.homelinux.org/