Here's something I don't understand:

My rights as the author and copyright holder of a piece of software I have written.

I just don't understand them.  And, hence, I do not understand what I may or may not be giving away.  Example: If I publish a program under the GPL am I still the owner of the software?  In what sense?

I've had conflicting opinions about the merits of going open source for my liveTopics program.  Before I make a final decision I want to really understand what I am doing either way and what I am, potentially, giving up.

Example scenario:

liveTopics 1.0 is published as an open source program under the GPL.   For whatever reason though the project does not thrive.  In the mean time I see commercial possibilities for the project with further significant development effort.  I create version 2.0 of liveTopics.

Am I bound by my own license to release it under the GPL?  Or do I have the right, as the owner, to decide I want to use a different license?

I'd really love someone to help me answer these kind of questions, it's frazzling my brain trying to understand this stuff.

[rebelutionary]

» Okay I'm finally catching up on all the news I haven't read for a few days.  Some interesting points from Mike.

As luck would have it Apache XML-RPC is the one I ended up downloading.  I had it hooked up to Radio and exchanging data in about as long as it took me to type this sentence, that was pretty cool.

I also choose to re-evaluate IDEA.  I actually came across this IDE a long time ago when I was using some of their refactoring tools for JBuilder.  At the time I dismissed it because (a) it didn't do very much that the free JRefactory tool couldn't already do, and, (b) I was doing GUI stuff and JBuilder does that.

I like a lot of what I see in IDEA and it's certainly a lot cheaper than JBuilder.  I just wonder how I'll hack the GUI bits and pieces without a visual designer...