Re: [CA cert] Termination of membership

[Ryan Verner <xfesty AT computeraddictions.com.au>]

On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 14:39, Nathan Reilly wrote:
> > Oh, and going back to open sourcing, if anyone were to operate in a 
> > commercial manner you can't force them to stop and/or give changes 
> > back because they wouldn't be distributing anything...
> 
> That all depends on the license the code is made available to them. If 
> it was GPL/BSD then you're right.

(Note, I'm talking purely hypothetically here, not making suggestions as
to what people should or shouldn't do).

There's always an original copyright holder; regardless of an open
source license being used or not.  Would Duane be this copyright holder
(after all, he did write the current code)?

In which case, Duane can do anything he wants to /his/ code, including
forking it and keeping that fork completely closed source, or using
snippets of code for his own closed source (and seperately licensed)
projects.

If somebody else commits code to the project, to be accepted (and
therefore typically in 99% of cases) that code comes under the same
license as the parent project, however, that person, by default, remains
copyright holder of that code.  Duane couldn't take additional changes
by others, and do things outside what the license allows him to do -
even if that code is only one line.

(Have there been any submissions from others so far, though, which would
muddy the waters?)

This is why projects like OpenOffice, owned by bodies such as Sun,
require (AFAIK) that copyright is assigned to them on any submitted code
before it is accepted; this way, they are able to release their
commercial fork and not be restricted.

I believe to achieve what the organisation wants, Duane releases the
CACert code under an open source license, but he remains copyright
holder.  There are no restrictions on how code is used, outside of the
OSS license chosen as soon as you place restrictions, it is arguably not
Free Software anymore.

Yes, this means somebody could start up a CACert competitor.  This is
part of the Free Software world; I would hope this is not new news.

Competition is a good thing though; it'll keep us on our toes and ensure
we really do have our stuff together - and hell, we've got a huge head
start.

R