Unpublished GPL Software

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 11:42:23PM +0200, 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. :)

Generally he can't.
Jest because he can use it for his work doesn't mean it has been
distributed to him.