On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 01:26:24AM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
It turns out that a couple of the things that people have said couldn't
happen under the GPL, have happened:
First, a project actually attempted to retroactively revoke the GPL. See:
http://sourceforge.net/developer/diary.php?diary_id=26407&diary_user=147583
Of course, whether this is legal or not is an open question. The smart
money is on not, but, of course, someone is going to have to pay the money
to fight it out.
It seems they would only have to pay to fight against a suit brought by the
author.
It seems to be one of those things where the person can say whatever they
want, in this particular instance without even reading the GPL FAQ which
states that the GPL cannot be retroactively revoked.
There's a lot of studying for some layers to do, but it would seem his only
valid claim would be that he didn't have the right to the previous code and
so couldn't have released it under the GPL. Generally these things tend to
work in the opposite direction to what he's trying to do, and
people/organizations try to be very carefully to prevent something from
being released.
BTW, his claim hasn't stopped independent developers from forking the last
GPL version and continuing development.
But yes, licenses are very complicated beasts.
David
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