mick writes: > What I intended to mean was if somebody wants to try to alter > (rescind) the license they would have to get the agreement of all the > previous authors whose work, released under the GPL, they used in > their code. Which I can't see happening.
"Rescind" implies that the copyright owner can inform people who have already received copies of the work under the terms of the GPL that the rights granted to them by the GPL have been revoked and that they are no longer free to redistribute the work under the terms of the GPL. This cannot happen because the GPL contains no clause permitting it. Think about it. If a copyright owner could revoke licenses arbitrarily despite the licenses not containing clauses permitting them to do so no copyright license would be worth anything at all. Software copyright licenses (real ones, not the "licenses" that products from Microsoft et al come with) sometimes do include revocation clauses. Such clauses always lay out in great detail the conditions under which revocation is possible. A copyright owner can, of course, start distributing copies of a work in which they own all the copyrights under different terms: this is what happens when a formerly closed source work is "open sourced". Obviously, if the work contains stuff in which others own copyright, all parties must agree to the change. -- John Hasler [email protected] Elmwood, WI USA
