On Friday, February 7, 2003, at 09:29 pm, Kalle Kivimaa wrote:
IANAL but this has been discussed extensively in for example Slashdot, and the current theory of licensing in the US and probably in EU as well is that a non-profit license can be revoked. It would mean that the copies in existence would stay legal but you couldn't distribute them any longer. The key here is that if the licensee compensates the licenser in any way, then the license can not be revoked, but if no compensation is made, then the license may be revoked by the licenser at will.
Well, IANAL either, but I'd have thought that publicising the licensor and their software by distributing it could very well be argued to be consideration. You'd have to pay a lot if you wanted to get your package as widely disseminated and publicised as, say, a package that gets included in Debian by doing it yourself.
I'd have thought that this would be particularly true in the case where the licensor wanted to revoke the license in order to prevent a free version of their software competing with their new non-free version; they've had their publicity and now they want to make money from it...
Of course, the law being an ass on a regular basis, this might well be just wishful thinking...
Cheers, Nick