On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 11:58:43AM +0800, Ian McKellar wrote:
> On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 07:43:10PM -0700, George wrote:
> > On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 07:59:16PM -0500, Sam TH wrote:
> > > This is actually an important question, since the code that is (c)
> > > Eazel will likely go to creditors/VCs, at which point the source
> > > license could be revoked. This would mean we would lose Nautilus as a
> > > part of the GNOME project, which we can all agree would be a terrible
> > > loss. Of course, this is unlikely, since significant work would have
> > > to be put into expunging the code not copyrighted to Eazel, and since
> > > most failed code just gets ignored (fortunately not the case here),
> > > but it would be a very bad thing.
> >
> > As far as I understand copyright law you cannot revoke a license. All that
> > the creditors could do is release a new version that could be proprietary
> > (sans all non-eazel copyrighted code of course), this is highly unlikely and
> > doesn't affect us one bit.
>
> And given the fact that some of the core architecture isn't copyright Eazel
> this would be very hard.
Well, the parts that are LGPL they could still link against.
But, in general, you are right. Nautilus would be useless to anyone
if it was taken closed source. In fact, doing so would require
significant effort on someones part. And if they didn't want to sell
it as a product, there would be no point at all in preventing us from
using the code.
But, as everyone must be aware, far, far dumber and more pointless
things have been done.
sam th --- sam uchicago edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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