Unpublished GPL Software

Imran Ghory ImranG at btinternet.com
Wed Jul 10 22:15:15 UTC 2002


On 10 Jul 2002, at 23:42, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> Rodger Etz-Brown <reb at b4mad.net> writes:
> > So what about an employee of company B, the company that wrote the
> > S/W, would publish it? Would he/she need to ask permission from any
> > of the companies? Is it legal to just take and publish any software
> > that is under the GPL, even the author(s) haven't published it
> > before?
> 
> If the employee of company B has (legal) access to the binary, and
> asks for the source code, then the employee can release the source
> code for the project into the "wild".  But hey, I'm no lawyer. :)

They should already have the source code, if they don't then 
section 3b of the GPL comes into play which says,

" Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to 
give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of 
physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-
readable copy of the corresponding source code"

That's _any third party_, anyone can get it.

IANAL.

Imran
-- 
TheOpenCD Project
Promoting Open Source on Windows
http://www.theopencd.org



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