Update to GCC copyright assignment policy

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2021 at 4:20 AM
> From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@orcam.me.uk>
> To: "DJ Delorie" <dj@redhat.com>
> Cc: "Paul Koning" <paulkoning@comcast.net>, gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Update to GCC copyright assignment policy
>
> On Tue, 1 Jun 2021, DJ Delorie via Gcc wrote:
>
> > > GCC is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> > > it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
> > > the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
> > > any later version.
> > >
> > > To me that means the recipient of the software can relicense it under
> > > a later license.  It doesn't say to me that the original distribution
> > > can do so.
> >
> > I've never read it that way.  To me it says "a recipient may
> > redistribute it under terms of a newer license, but the license remains
> > v3+ even if they do" - we're giving the recipient a choice of actions,
> > but not power to relicense.
>
>  My interpretation of this would be for modifications rather than original
> sources, so v3+ applies to unmodified sources (for obvious reasons, given
> that the recipient of the sources is not a copyright holder), however as a
> copyright holder I can release my modifications say under v4 or v4+.  It
> is unclear to me if the newer licence will then "stick" to the rest of the
> sources, but I suspect it will.  A copyright assignment made to FSF (or
> another legal entity) prevents this complication from happening.
>
>   Maciej

No.  What the copyright holder can do is the re-license by any other license
he wants (even proprietary).  But you can't !!!  That's the basic difference.


----- Christopher Dimech

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