[Gllug] Hypothetical GPL question

Tue Oct 9 14:24:34 UTC 2001

On Tuesday, 9 Oct 2001, Paul Brazier wrote:
>Suppose for example a group of people produced a GPL program that became
>really popular. Then they suddenly closed off the source (but kept the
>binary freely distributable). That might cause a lot of problems for
>people stuck with using it.

Not really, since if it was that popular it would just be forked.

>Once a program is GPL, can the authors
>change the license to a non-free one as long as every contributor
>agrees?

Yes, but that's hard to do with a popular program, since you would
presumably have accepted patches from many people.

>Effectively freezing the publicly available source at that point?

It's not frozen; it can still be modified by third parties.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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