[TYPO3-50-general] TYPO3 5.0 license

[Michael Scharkow]

Thomas Hempel wrote:

> There is a big chance that I'm wrong! ;-) But there must be a reason 
> that there are a lot of products that come with a dual-license. ;-)

Hi Thomas,

Apart from the fact that dual-licensing is practically impossible 
because of the current situation, I don't think there is a good reason 
to do so. Relicensing would only be necessary if third parties would 
want to *distribute* TYPO3 with their proprietary additions (or in other 
terms incorporate TYPO3 code in their distributed software). GPL does 
not prohibit adding proprietary code to be created and used privately 
(=for a customer), so I can hardly think of a situation that would make 
dual-licensing necessary and not end up in free-riding.

> I was not aware of the the fact (?) that in Germany a developer can't 
> give away his copyright. If this is correct how can it be that in all 
> files of TYPO3 Kasper is mentioned as copyright holder?

Elmar and Steffen are correct, and the fact that in the php files Kasper 
is mentioned as the copyright owner of the whole TYPO3 core does not 
mean that he owns the copyright of the respective code parts[1]. Those 
still belong to the authors which is IMHO a good thing because a lot of 
us want their contributions to be GPL only and would withdraw their 
contributions immediately for other licenses.

Greetings,
Michael

[1] Authorship and copyright exist from the creation of the code, and do 
not need to be stated explicitly with the notorious (c)!