in reply to pondering on potential copyright issues

The existing code was already released under the existing licenses. Unless there's an explicit expiration date in the license, there's no form of revocation available.

A future version of the module may be released under a more restrictive license (or not at all), but that wouldn't stop you from using the old license, or even derivative works.

And yes, this has happened in the "real world". Consider the http://xfree86.org decision to change the licensing terms of the distribution, making it "less free". This has resulted in a forked distribution being maintained by a group of others now.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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  • Comment on Re: pondering on potential copyright issues

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Re^2: pondering on potential copyright issues
by apotheon (Deacon) on May 06, 2005 at 01:15 UTC

    Precisely so.

    As schweini suggested, this would effectively result in a "fork", where one development version becomes proprietary and the other remains FLOSS. This is basically the only way for someone to get a closed-source version of Linux into existence: get a separate licensing deal from all relevant copyright holders.

    Even so, they'd then end up with just another copy that they could take in different directions without contributing back to the FLOSS pool. There would be no revocation of FLOSS licensing outside the terms of the license itself (in the case of the Linux kernel, the GPL). The same sort of rule applies to FLOSS-licensed Perl modules: once released, it's in the wild. One could conceivably "buy" the rights to it, but could not then terminate the previously existing licenses, and thus the free version would remain.

    disclaimer: I am not a scourge of mankind lawyer.

    print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
    		 - apotheon
    CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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