Jan 21, 2026, 4:27:06 AM
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Sweet Home 3D Forum » List all forums » » Forum: Sweet Home 3D bar » » » Thread: Review of the last 14 months... » » » » Post: Re: Review of the last 14 months... |
Print at Jan 21, 2026, 4:27:06 AM |
| Posted by sjb007 at Nov 10, 2025, 7:59:18 PM |
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Re: Review of the last 14 months... Ultimately, they should be releasing their new versions on Sourceforge per GPLV2 rules. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I've just been around a long time. That isn't how copyright works. If they purchased the copyright from Emmanuel, then it is perfectly legal for them to release their code and future modifications under a proprietary license only. They couldn't include other peoples GPL code. They would either have to negotiate with each of those people for the rights to their contribution, or strip the GPL-only code out. This is tricky, because you can't have someone who just stripped code out, then re-implement the functionality - their knowledge is tainted by viewing and removing the GPL code. I looked at the code base commit authors, and I don't think Emmanuel accepted external contributors except one for a brief period very early on. I don't know if he ever credited code committed by him to someone else. This issue is one of the reasons for Contributor License Agreements. It is so companies can pursue dual-licensing their products, (i.e. a Community edition, and a Commercial edition), and fold community contributions into their commercial application under the proprietary license, and avoiding having to open source their secret money-making sauce. What the GPL protects is anyone taking the currently available GPL code base (7.5 in Sourceforge) and building it and releasing a derived application. This can only be released as GPL, because only the copyright holder can distribute under different licensing terms. If someone were to do this, they would also not be allowed to call it Sweet Home 3D (or something too similar) because that is a registered trademark. I checked WIPO and Sweet Home 3D is registered to Space Mushrooms. It has been since 2019 which is a bit of an eye-opener! |
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