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Peercast Source Available
jilles writes "Peercast, a p2p streaming program, has had some attention on slashdot recently. Now the source code has been released under GPL. Please find the announcement + source code here."
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You must not connect to the main PeerCast network if you have modified any of the code in the `core` module.
Yeah sure... how many crackers will adhere to this condition?
The whole patch issue has been addressed. It comes down to the fact that by submitting a patch to a program under a certain licensing structure, you are implictly consenting to have your code licensed under the same structure. Why else would you have submitted the patch? And anyway, any patch that the original author would want to distribute as part of the application is almost certainly a derivitive work under copyright law, and not yours anyway, much like the way a second verse to a copyrighted song isn't yours.
It's not fishy at all. In fact, it's very much what the GPL has in mind. The GPL is about letting people have the freedom to modify the code they run and to distribute those changes, rather than being forced to treat all software as a big black box that they have to beg vendors to fix when it breaks. (Well, that and disclaiming liability.) Giving people the additional freedom to keep those changes secret and still distribute the product is perfectly fine, as long as you wrote all the code (or it was given to you). As the owner of the a program, you have all rights to it, and can give any subset of those rights you want in exchange for anything. There's nothing the GPL can do about that, short of adding a "belongs to RMS" clause.
The GPL is not about keeping money away from code.
Updates to the GPL are going to be about closing the loophole of web applications and the like, not about this.
As far as I know, the GPL doesn't stipulate that you must agree to the GPL in order to use the software. Since the GPL affords extra rights you can either:
a) use the software like any other closed source software, with all the protections of copyright law (eg no unauthorised distribution etc.)
or b) agree to the GPL, and in doing so receive the extra rights that the author gives you such as the right to modify, reate derivative works etc, under the conditions specified in the agreement.
You have a choice - either agree to the GPL in it's entirety or just use the software under the usual terms of copyright law. The GPL is not a EULA that defines the terms of you using the software, it is an agreement one chan choose to enter into, in order to gain additional rights.
Whenever you get QT, IIRC, all of the source code in Troll Tech's distribution is owned by Troll Tech, even if there are revised versions floating around for KDE, or distribution packages.
There is no legal grey area here - developers can license there code under several licenses, and no reasonable change I can see to the GPL will stop that. Further, I can't see the FsF having any disare to put an end to the practice, as it is, in reality, supporting the end goal of Free Software.
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