[PD] PiDiP's legal status

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Actually, it does work like that in this situation.  PiDiP started with
> GNU GPL'ed code, therefore must remain GPL'ed.  Yves could get
> permission from the effectv for a different license, then change the
> PiDiP license, but that would only affect future versions of PiDiP.

I'm looking at clause 5 of the GPL right now and it's quite perplexing.
I'm quite convinced that it's not permitted by law to take a package that
is not legally distributable and assume that its licensing is something
else just because it's the only way out for the software to stay
distributable. I'm looking at clause 4 and it would seem that "any attempt
to sublicense the program is void, and will automatically terminate your
rights under this License", which is not the same as a license magically 
being applied to the derivative works without the consent of the author 
of the derivative works (who holds a copyright on the modifications made 
to the original works).

Maybe it's time to ask for advice from the Free Software Foundation and/or 
other similar organisms?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada