GPL Time Bomb – an interesting approach to FOSS licensing

Re:GPL Time Bomb – an interesting approach to FOSS licensing by martingxx on Friday September 09, 2016 @06:14AM (#12460804)

"My point is that with GPL, the implementation of the fixes/new features is right in front of you, you see it, yet you can't merge it into your GPL-incompatible codebase."

1) You almost certainly can as long as it's trivial, or you didn't look at the fix but did it independently based on a description of the bug. Legally, it all comes down to whether your work was a derived work or the original, not whether the result looks the same.

2) That's the idea anyway! Allowing someone to copy the work of others into a codebase that doesn't allow similar copying is exactly what the GNU GPL is designed to prevent. It's a risk you take if you decide to maintain a proprietary fork.

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Re:GPL Time Bomb – an interesting approach to FOSS licensing by alexvoda on Friday September 09, 2016 @04:04PM (#12465631)

K_sze's point was that it is a lot harder to prove you have not seen and were not inspired by publicly available code than it is to prove you were not inspired by code that was kept secret.

And while someone using free software in a non-free fork can release the changes as shared-source leading to the same problem, this has rarely happened.

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