Comment by MrBra
11 years ago
Pardon my ignorance, but I've never adventured too much into licensing stuff myself, and always had this kind of silly question roaming in my mind: what would happen if someone - after releasing some code open-source with the most permissive license, say on Github - immediately after changed their mind and changed the license back to a very restrictive one and someone had forked the project in that short range of time? Would their forked repository with the permissive license version be a totally legit code repository ?
I know this is sounds silly, but I wonder if it's a thing or not that when a software company publicly releases some valuable code open-source, then there is always someone thinking: "better fork this as quick as possible! you never know!" :)
They can close-source it again, they can't stop you using the open source version they did release. If you have the licence, you have the licence, and it is perpetual. You can't unscramble the egg.
There are quite a few products around which fit that type of scenario - where an older, free version is still circulating while the company now distributes a close source paid version.