Re: Packaging a software with "moving" licence
Scripsit Decklin Foster <decklin@red-bean.com>
> Florent Bayle writes:
>> we can't be sure that the licence would remain the same over the time, and
>> thus we couldn't guarantee that it will always remains free.
> This is a maintence problem, not a legal one. If upstream decides to
> "take it proprietary" (which has nothing to do with how the current
> license is distributed), then the free code either finds a new
> maintainer,
One might fear that the current situation is meant as a lawyerbomb,
and that it is supposed to mean, "at any given point in time you get
the rights described by the license text we choose to put on this URL,
and no more".
I don't think this interpretation is so far-fetched that we should
base our decisions on the hope that it won't convince a court.
(In particular, the GPL itself does not explicitly claim to be
irrevocable. The free software community generally believes it to be
_implicitly_ irrevocable, but that won't necessarily impress a court
faced with a plaintiff's argument: "look, we explicitly and
deliberately structured our copyright notice such that we could change
the license terms at any time, and the defendant should have known
that text on a website may change from time to time").
--
Henning Makholm "They want to be natural, the anti-social
little beasts. They just don't realize that
everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation."
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