Can he? What would he be able to take and leave? What would that do to Linux?
This question has been on my mind for a long time, but never got around to asking it.
Can he? What would he be able to take and leave? What would that do to Linux?
This question has been on my mind for a long time, but never got around to asking it.
You can’t just replace the licence with a new, more restrictive, one. Unless each and every contributor to the codebase agrees
Actually you can’t do that at all. Licenses are not revocable
Wrong(ish). You’re correct in that you cannot revoke previous licenses, but you can license new code differently if all copyright holders agree.
No you can make new code under any license without approval.
I think if every contributor ever agreed, you could switch to a more permissive license that permits a superset of the original license.
The direction of your change doesn’t matter, the GPL license under which the program was already given out is not revocable.
If all copyright holders agree you can grant a different license in addition to the first one, or you can stop offering one license and start offering another one, all the new changes that were never offered under the first one will then only be publicly available under the new license.
But anyone who received the code at a specific time with a GPL license can keep it, modify it, distribute it onwards with the same license and so on, no matter what new terms the copyright holders begin to offer to other people later.