[lug] GPL question

[Jeffrey Siegal]

Let's break this down.

>     I have a GPL question I was hoping some one can help with.
> I was under contract with a company here in Boulder to refurbish their
> website.  I used PHP_NUKE, OSCOMMERCE and wrote several cool
> modules/hacks to meet the companies needs.

By "under contract" what exactly do you mean?  Did you agree to assign 
the work over to the company?  If so, its theirs to do with as they 
please.  If not, then it still belongs to you and you can do what you 
please.

>  The company was made to understand that it would save money to use GPL
> code and I was given permission to GPL all of my code.

What does "given permission to GPL all of my code" mean?  Was this 
written in to the contract?  If so, then you are within your rights to 
insist that the contract, including the provision that the work be 
GPLed, be followed.  If the permission was more informal, then the 
company may be within its rights to say "sorry, we changed our mind."

> Now the company
> wants me to roll out of the GPL for all the modules that I've built and
> worse yet 1/2 the code is already on Sourceforge.net .  

The reality is that you can always remove it from sourceforge, right? In 
theory the GPLed code may already have been downloaded by other people, 
but there isn't anything you can do about that.  If it isn't a very 
popular project the chances are it hasn't been downloaded much and just 
pulling it off sourceforge would mostly remove it from the public sphere.

>  So my gut says its all GPL code I've written that uses open source as
> the content engine and I *can't* un-GPL it (what ever that means) and my
> code that hasn't been published needs to be GPL. 

Depending on how it interacts with the content engine, it may be a 
derived work and therefore be irrevocably subject to GPL.  Nevertheles, 
as a practical matter, the GPL never requires anyone to actively 
distribute GPLed code (except to the extent that they volunarily 
distribute binaries, the GPL requires that they also distribute source). 
  So if you pull it off sourceforge (and don't publish it elsewhere), 
the company can probably get what it wants.

Try to work this out with them.