> What happens if the uutils team says that they're not releasing the source of the latest version but the $CURRENT-5 from now on, moving to a closed source, op

> What happens if the uutils team says that they're not releasing the source of the latest version but the $CURRENT-5 from now on, moving to a closed source, open baggage model? What prevents them from pulling an effective EEE? I don't follow this argument. This can happen under GPL as well. Nothing stops the copyright holder from relicensing future versions of the software under a different license. The existing versions already out there under GPL/LPGL/MIT/BSD, there's no take backs, but the copyright holder is free to do whatever they want with future versions. What would happen in your hypothetical scenario is that everyone would get really really angry with the uutils team and the latest open source version would get forked by the community. The proprietary one would wither and die, because who in their right mind wants a proprietary set of coreutils? Fundamentally, the choice between copyleft and permissive is simply if you care that someone takes your software and incorporates it into a proprietary package. Clearly, the uutils team doesn't care if eg. Apple makes a proprietary fork of uutils for OS X. And that's their prerogative.