Re: SGI releases IA64 C C++ and F90 compiler under GPL

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at cygnus dot com>]

On May 21, 2000, Marc Espie <espie@quatramaran.ens.fr> wrote:

> Giving away your copyright to the FSF means the code will be distributed
> under the GPL only. 

Nope.  You're free to keep distributing your code with whatever
license better suits you, because the copyright assignment says so:
while you assign copyright to the FSF, FSF grants you the right to do
whatever you want with the code you're assigning.

> I can see why SGI would like not to lose the ownership of the code.
> If they want to dual-license it at some point, say keep a GPL license,
> and reissue it under a BSD license, they can---as long as they haven't
> forfeited the right to.

Even if they assigned the copyright to the FSF, they'd only be
forbidden from re-releasing their own code under a BSD license if
their code started to depend on somebody else's GPLed code.

> I have some code (leaner, meaner faster hash-table) which could
> benefit gcc, which I am quite willing to release under the GPL, but
> which is also under a BSD license. In short, I can't give it to the
> FSF.

If your reason for not donating the code to the FSF is because you
think you wouldn't be allowed to release it under a BSD license,
please read the copyright assignment contract and reconsider your
decision.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva    Enjoy Guaranį, see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company        aoliva@{redhat, cygnus}.com
Free Software Developer and Evangelist    CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}   Write to mailing lists, not to me