The article goes on to paint a doomsday scenario about how there will be an older version and a newer version of Linux floating around, and how such a division will split and ultimately weaken the Linux operating system.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-02
Since the definition of a derived work is pretty broad in the respective law. For example, a work based on another work is considered derivative. So if you write a program using characters from Harry Potter (a game, for example), with their recognizable features, you're deriving from Rowling's work, and she has a say in what you can do with the resulting work. Harry Potter is not
licensed under the GPL, so the 'virality' of Rowling's copyrights has nothing to do with the GPL.[1]
Copyright law grants the original author exclusive rights, that she gets to keep through all modifications of the work. If the author does not like what you're doing with their work, they can prohibit you from distributing the result, like some right holders have done with music mashups, like the 'Dean Gray' album.
The main difference between BSD and GPL is that they use the 'virality' (i.e. exclusive grant of certain rights to the original author stretching over to derived works) embedded in copyright law for different goals: BSD to force you to propagate the original author's copyright notice, GPL to force you to propagate the GPL.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Lawsuits
Edited 2006-10-15 13:28
Member since:
2006-09-24
"All copyright is viral. If I take any copyrighted work and create a derived work, the derived work is covered by the copyright on the original, regardless of the license the original work was under. The difference is that the GPL allows me the freedom to release such a work."
That's not even close to true. If I take a piece of BSD licensed code and create a series of patches for it, I can license them any way I want to whether it be BSDL, GPL, or commercial. If I do the same with a piece of GPL'd code I HAVE to license my code under the GPL. That is where the viral part comes in. Not all copyright is viral.