Mozilla Thunderbird

[Jan Morén]

sön 2005-01-02 klockan 15:14 +0000 skrev Sean Miller:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> 
> >Unless you're the copyright holder, of course.
> >  
> >
> Which the mighty Novell make a big point of making on their "About"

"Novell, Inc. and Others"

Two points: first, to change the license (and note that nobody has even
seriously suggested that they would have any interest in doing so), they
would need the approval of every committer to the application, or
rewrite those pieces themselves. Not impossible (mozilla managed to do
it), but a boatload of work and problems.

Second, you can't "un-gpl" the versions already out there. Nothing stops
the community from continuing with the latest gpl:ed version. This is
what happened with X and it parallels the events leading to OpenSSH (the
authors of ssh tried to go commercial and people started building on the
last open version instead, effectively relegating the original
developers to niche status).


Oh, and as a bonus point: they have absolutely no reason at all to ever
do such an utterly stupid thing. And with the acceptance of evolution
and eds into the core Gnome distribution, it is rather moving in the
other direction.



-- 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel. (Japan) 090-3622 8920            Dr. Jan Morén (mr)
                                      Dept. of Cognitive Science
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren    Lund, Sweden