Comment by Xylakant

I realise the license doesn't bind the original copyright owner. That's not what I was arguing.

I'm saying that if the original licensor (ie. the copyright owner) offers software that they fully own to people under the terms of the GPL, they're binding the licensee (ie. the entity receiving the software) such that further redistribution of the binary that the licensee received has to come with an offer to receive the source code - which is something that the licensee cannot offer if they don't have access to the source code themselves.

I'm arguing that such a situation (ie. the original copyright owner not offering source code, but at the same time saying that the people receiving the software have to offer the source code if they want to redistribute the binary) is unreasonable to the point where it feels like there may be some legal action that could be taken, as at that point the license is asking people to do things that they literally cannot do.

> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code

For any small to medium sized projects with zero external contributors, it's highly unlikely that anyone would pursue legal action so the person who owns the project does de facto have this right whether or not it's legal according to the license.

> Things get more complicated if there are external contributors

I don't think this is complicated - unless there's a contributor agreement that people have signed that says otherwise, people have copyright on the code they have contributed so the original creator doesn't have a right to relicense their code.

However, again it comes down to whether anyone would bring a legal fight and the answer is almost certainly no. Forking the code is much more likely at that point.