Binary, GPL Distribution Both NOT LEGAL! (Score 2)

WRONG! If you run an Open Source project and you don't get contributed code assigned to you (and then forward it to RMS) then you DO NOT own that code. You do not have rights to distribute that code. All ownership resides with the contributor. This is why RMS makes a big deal out of getting people to assign their code to the Free Software Foundation. For instance, if you pop on over to http://www.xemacs.org and read about the differences between XEmacs and GNUEmacs, you'll see that one of the big reasons the XEmacs code has not been re-integrated into the GNU/Emacs is because some of the contributors have not (or perhaps refuse for philosophical reasons) assigned the rights to the Free Software Foundation. I'm not aware of an court cases involving open source software, so I'm *pretty sure* that the first one that comes about will go ALL ACROSS THE BOARD: The company that sues will stick to a strict interpretation of copyright law (i.e., the GPL is hogwash, and that it's not clear even if it was legal, whether the source code IN QUESTION was clean, and untainted by other licenses -- what if code under one license gets combined with GPL code? What license is it under? Can you prove that all the code in your tree is 100% GPL'd? I strongly doubt that any open source project can say this -- most don't keep any records of anything. LET ME CLARIFY: You probably *do not* have legal rights to distribute GPL'd code, for the same reason you probably *do not* have legal rights to distribute a shrink-wrapped binary version - No one has assigned the code to you. It doesn't matter if you're giving it away or selling it. For all you know half your contributions could be from proprietary code bases that programmers mistakeningly thought their company had no interest in...