[Typo3] Typo3 Sell Out a Reality?

[Patrice Neff]

"John Dawson" <dawson_john at sbcglobal.net> writes:

> Although this may in fact be a joke given the date, does anyone understand 
> the GPL license enough to know the likelihood of something like this 
> happening at some point in the future? In other words, is it even possible 
> to sell the copyright to open-source code? And if so, what are the odds of 
> this becoming reality?

Basically, the copyright owner(s) can sell the software. Existing
releases must always be GPL, though. So of course you could just fork
and the community could continue development of TYPO3 under the GPL
license. This story has actually happened with TuxRacer (the fork is
PlanetPenguin Racer).

Anyway, in order to change the license, all copyright owners must
agree on the plan. Some projects require CVS committers to sign a
document giving the copyright to either the project leader or - more
common - to some foundation. The main reason for that is *not* the
hope of cashing in but the possibility to change the license. For
example in the (very) hypothetical setting that the GPL was somehow
invalidated, the project could easily switch to another license such
as the BSD license.

I don't know clearly how TYPO3 handles it, but I make the educated
guess, that the copyright is owned by the respective coder. The Linux
kernel handles it that way. I have seen some references to the
"central model" on the Gnus mailing list. It seems they require
committers to give the copyright to a central entity.

Patrice

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the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation
through faith in Christ Jesus.                    (2 Timothy 3:15)