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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

It's a good question. Today, I definitely agree with you that the Light Table team has given far more to the world than the world has given back to them, so it seems like a very fair trade. But in a few years, we could imagine that the majority of contributions come donated for free from volunteers. Would it still be fair then?

> You can always fork the project, put your own branding on it and make money off your contributions still :) It's just not possible to make money under their brand.

This doesn't sound right. You'd be forbidden from selling non-GPLv3 access to any of the existing code, even under a new brand, and any plugins that you created would either be GPLv3, or not distributable at all.

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> But in a few years, we could imagine that the majority of contributions come donated for free from volunteers. Would it still be fair then?

Yes, because running a project, mentoring, moderation and releasing in an orderly fashion is far more work then most people expect.

> This doesn't sound right. You'd be forbidden from selling non-GPLv3 access to any of the existing code, even under a new brand, and any plugins that you created would either be GPLv3, or not distributable at all.

You can definitely sell GPLv3 software. As long as the source is available and you abide by the terms of the licence.

Exactly!

I know that -- that's why I said "selling non-GPLv3 access". The point is that the LT devs can do something with your contributions (sell them under non-GPLv3 for money as part of a non-GPLv3 Light Table) that you can't, and it's reasonable that some would find this distasteful.

Unless you do a copyright assignment to them, they couldn't sell your GPL3 contributions under a non-GPLv3 license. It wouldn't just be distasteful, but would be against the license.

They actually can't, since your contributions have to be GPLv3 and thus their inclusion of your code has to be as well. The entire point of the GPL is to prevent what you're suggesting.

That is true, if the LT team doesn't require a copyright assignment by all contributors (or similar). If they do, they can relicense it. That's the question being discussed.

Yes sorry, I realised my omission and edited my post just before you commented. You are right that you wouldn't be able to sell your code under a different license than GPLv3, whilst the person you signed the copyright to would.

> But in a few years, we could imagine that the majority of contributions come donated for free from volunteers. Would it still be fair then?

I would hope that by that time, all significant contributions would be in the form of plugins, which are not required to be GPLv3 as far as I'm aware, or even require a sign away of copyright. The question would then be, do you want to sell your plugin through their system, or distribute it on your own.

> plugins, which are not required to be GPLv3 as far as I'm aware

Chris said in the thread that plugins would be "infected" by GPLv3: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/light-table-discussion...

What if your plugin communicates to a plugin that exposes a plain text interface? I guess it depends on the upcoming API copyright-ability ruling..

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