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Copyright owners can always decide to release future versions under whatever license they please.
by legulere 11y ago
Copyright owners can always decide to release future versions under whatever license they please.
- mintplant 11y agoNot if sufficiently many contributions from the community are incorporated into the code.
- quadrangle 11y agoA project that's copyleft and accepts contributions under copyleft without a CLI means that nobody has the power to unilaterally bypass the copyleft term for the whole project.
- EvanPlaice 11y agoThe thing is, contributors hold an implicit copyright to any work they produce. So, it's not possible to change the license without either extracting code contributions or gaining approval from all contributors. That's why many GPL/LGPL projects couldn't change licenses, even if they wanted to. Sufficiently unrestrictive licenses (ex MIT) allow anybody to use the code for whatever their purpose, commercial or otherwise. Even then, prior art limits others from seizing ownership and limiting access to the original creators/contributors. Disclaimer: IANAL but this is only my understanding from working in OSS.