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> Do you have any standing to make this wild claim that goes against any legal precedent? What legal precedent are you talking about? In general, bare license

by hnfong 4y ago

> Do you have any standing to make this wild claim that goes against any legal precedent? What legal precedent are you talking about? In general, bare licenses (where the licensee does not give anything valuable to the licensor) can be revoked with sufficient notice. This is law in most jurisdictions I'm aware of. And this is taught to law students in their textbooks (heck if you just look up "bare licenses" in legal dictionaries you'll probably find something to that effect). Do you have any standing to claim that OSS goes against this general rule? The practical reason this doesn't happen is that revoking the OSS license of published code is pretty much un-enforceable and pointless exercise. There's no practical advantage that can be conceivably gained from such a stunt (unless you want the infamy for being the first person to attempt this), especially considering the PR fallout. But I'll assure you that, if you actually try, and send emails to legal departments of sufficiently large companies notifying them that you revoked an OSS license of a project that you own, most of those companies will avoid using your projects and will try to transition away. I can't imagine any half-decent corporate lawyer advising the company that they definitely won't get into trouble because the precedent says OSS copyright owners can't do this. FWIW I think some of them might actually tell you that you can't do this (which is mostly a bluff), but that's not going to be what they'll advise their clients/employers. Disclaimer: IANAL but have a law degree.

kazinator 4y ago
I suspect most mainstream distros will swiftly drop the code if they get a revocation notice. They are already paranoid. If the software disappears from mainstream distros and its upstream repo is shut down, with notices that the free license has been revoked and forking isn't permitted, it's only a matter of time before it fizzles away. If it's something of great interest to individual hobbyists, it might persist for years, but enterprises and institutions will not knowingly want to touch it. (If they really need it, they may seek licensing of the continuing proprietary version, if it exists). If a security vulnerability is found in the code, it may need expert attention; but the experts will be required to perpetrate copyright infringement in order to fix it; it will have to be done anonymously. Then you need some place to host that and so on. The proprietary version will have all the fixes and improvements, so that the old once-free version will just recede into the past as a broken old illegal version of a proprietary program, essentially no different from an ancient source code leak.

by hnfong 4y ago

kazinator 4y ago

I suspect most mainstream distros will swiftly drop the code if they get a revocation notice. They are already paranoid. If the software disappears from mainstream distros and its upstream repo is shut down, with notices that the free license has been revoked and forking isn't permitted, it's only a matter of time before it fizzles away. If it's something of great interest to individual hobbyists, it might persist for years, but enterprises and institutions will not knowingly want to touch it. (If they really need it, they may seek licensing of the continuing proprietary version, if it exists). If a security vulnerability is found in the code, it may need expert attention; but the experts will be required to perpetrate copyright infringement in order to fix it; it will have to be done anonymously. Then you need some place to host that and so on. The proprietary version will have all the fixes and improvements, so that the old once-free version will just recede into the past as a broken old illegal version of a proprietary program, essentially no different from an ancient source code leak.