Comment by mcpackieh
2 years ago
From what I gather, the author isn't re-licensing the code but is selling their copyright and brand (trademark?) to Zipo, who in turn will probably try to re-license it (without permission from other contributors) or will simply choose to violate the license.
The latter part is not legal as far as I know, which then makes the first part moot. Unfortunately, I cannot find a good reference for this from the FSF's website, I am going off of memory. But I believe this matter is precisely one of the reasons not to use a liberal licence, or be wary of contributing to liberally-licensed projects.
If all the other contributors had signed over their copyright to the original author, then the author or whoever he sells the copyright to could release future versions under a different license. Copyright assignment is often done (for instance, with official GNU projects) because it makes license enforcement easier. However it also makes re-licensing easier. As far as I know, other contributors to these projects never signed over their copyright, so the original authors can't sell that code to this company in the first place. Since the company doesn't own that code, they can only use it under the terms of the GPL.
With liberal licenses (BSD, etc), the license permits distributing binaries without releasing the code so re-licensing isn't even necessary. Any corp can take the code and make it proprietary in full compliance with the original license.
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. Also, I take it whatever adware they want to add is proprietary, so that won't be compatible with the GPL'ed code anyway. The legal basis for this sellout seems very thin to me altogether. I think the company's only option would be to remove every single third-party contribution?
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With BSD, anyone can take the code and build a derivative product, under whatever business model, open source or not.
GPL, on the other hand, can make it possible for a corp to buy the project and effectively prevent further development, like it happened with MySQL.
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