* On 8/7/19 12:58 PM, Giovanni Mascellani wrote: > Agreed. There is no way to obtain tacit permission for anything except > what the copyright holder has already declared (except for copyright > expiration, but that takes veeery long). In order to relicense, explicit > permission must be given by each of the copyright holders. Exceptions > can possibly be made for trivial contributions by reasoning that they > are so simple that they cannot be considered copyrightable, but that's a > very risky way. If some copyright holder (or their heirs) cannot be > contacted or do not agree, their contributions must be removed and > possibly rewritten, and again this entails a lot of risk, because it's > on those who are relicensing to prove that they removed all the > contributions by such copyright holder and that what was written to > patch the removal is actually independent. This said, there is the concept of abandonware, which is a specialization of orphan works. For such works, while the copyright is still valid and protected, the rightholders might not pursue violations. One might argue, and this might be what the original poster also intended to say, that it's expected that the original authors won't interfere at all. Still, that sounds like very thin ice to me. Additionally, even just *using* orphan works might not be permissible in some jurisdictions. That's not relevant for Truecrypt, since the license explicitly allows that, but modifying the code's license is an entirely different beast. Mihai
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