On Monday 03 September 2007 14:26:29 Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
I hate to belabor the point, but you seem to be making the mistake of "The
license applies to the copyright holder" that I've seen a lot of people make
(and kept quiet about).
The person holding the copyright has all the legal standing to revoke a
license grant at any time. Licenses such as the GPL are not signed contracts,
and that means there are limits to what effect they can have on the copyright
holder.
If the license was of the "signed contract" type, or contained text stating
that the copyright holder was giving up all rights of revocation (etc...) I
could agree with you. As it stands, no "Open Source" license that I have seen
used on a major project contains any part that does that. In fact, the GPL is
the only license I can name (offhand) that even touches on the rights of the
copyright holder - and then it is in the form of "If you do X, Y or Z all
rights granted under this license are automatically revoked".
That is an "automatic clause" - not a limitation stating that the copyright
holder can only revoke under those conditions. The person holding the
copyright has quite a few rights - more than people believe - and not even
the most generous of Open Source licenses (except those that contain text
like "granted in perpetuity" or similar) even come close to being exempt from
the holder of the copyright not being able to summarily revoke a given
persons license.
DRH
--
Dialup is like pissing through a pipette. Slow and excruciatingly painful.
-
