On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 03:03 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
[ The different modes of development have already well established
names. Look up Open Core, centralized copyright etc)
note 1: Change of license is only possible if all the contributorsagree
to the change. Even if one disagrees, his work has to be removedbefore
the license is changed. Which means that once the number ofcontributors
reaches a critical mass, change of license is impossible.
Not really true. Number of contributors is irrelevant. What is
important is diversity of copyright holders or the specific
permissions
provided by a contributions license agreement if one exists. MySQL or
Openoffice.org or most of the FSF/GNU projects has a single copyright
holder and that entity can change the license anytime they want to.
Also
not all contributions are worthy of copyright.
note 2: Although software cannot be stolen or made proprietary (onlya
copy can be stolen or made proprietary), the owner of the copyrightcan
sell the copyright (as opposed to selling a copy). But if the numberof
developers has reached a critical mass, selling the copyright isalso
impossible.
Copyright laws have several major differences depending on which part
of
the world we are talking about.
In some places, public domain is not a
legally recognized concept for instance.
