Hey everyone,

I have a rather odd question about the GPL and copyright working together. I'm not a GPL expert (and am certainly not a lawyer) and just wondered if anyone here could point me in the right direction.

Here's the (hypothetical) situation.

A university (let's call it University of Snarfulp) creates an open-source project (let's call it Razzor) and hosts it on Arbulforge.net (names changed to protect the innocent, haha).

The project is awesome and everyone loves it. It takes off and gains a large following, but then declines to the point that there are no source code checkins for 12 months and no forum posts for 9 months.
Then, a new administrator takes over and gathers interest, and the project takes off again with a new set of developers.

Ok, so here's where things start to get tricky.

All of the source code in the SVN repository have headers at the top that say:

Copyright (c) 2004, University of Snarfulp.
License: GPL (you get the gist)

When the project was booming the first time, the UoS (University of Snarfulp) project managers asked that everyone that submitted new code voluntarity attribute copyright to UoS "to protect it". Sounded fair enough at the time, I'm sure.

Then, when the project died, all suport from UoS died as well. They stopped adding new code, and didn't post to the email lists or the forum in well over 2 years. The project administrators (which were students at the UoS, and probably graduated by now) during the first boom do not respond to emails anymore, either.

So....my question is -- The new set of developers are afraid that after all of their most recent work (after interest was renewed) will be taken over by the University of Snarfulp since they own the copyright.

As I understand it, the copyright holder (in this case, UoS) can at any later time change the license on the code from GPL to anything else (closed source??), correct?

The fact that UoS has the copyright for an open-source project that they no longer actively support has the current developers worried, and is hurting the project.

What can be done to remedy this situation? Any ideas?

I know this is a rather odd post -- if you've gotten this far, thanks for reading. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Conner

you can't be a little bit pregnant. the gpl _is_ a copyright license and if the authors voluntarily released their work under it, the other copyright means exactly squat.

i'm not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, void in rhode island, etc.

AFAIK, yes...
The copyright holder has the right to redistribute the source in a closed source BUT look at this scenario:
A release source code of his application under GPL (copyright owner)
B obtains it
B changed the source code
A took the source code and redistribute it as proprietary software (copyright owner)
B is still allowed to distribute the source code since the source code he got it is GPLed
I'm no lawyer... So... I'm not sure about this... I do NOT take any responsibility over what I've said wrongly...
Hope this helps...

Hey guys,

Thanks a bunch. That makes sense -- I remember reading the section about redistribution. That's good stuff.

@ghostdev85: So, going through the scenario again...
While B may be allowed by the GPL to continue distributing the copy of code that they obtained (along with their modifications) if A makes it closed-source, this still doesn't prevent A from using the latest modifications in their closed-source version.

I don't know, that certainly does not sound fair to me -- to start a project, then ignore it and let other people work on it for over a year, and then come back and take the new parts as well.

I suppose you could get around this if the new developers do not voluntarily give the copyright to A.

Strange stuff, this GPL. I guess it makes an attempt to try to eliminate these sorts of disputes.

Cheers,
Conner