this is somewhat misleading, although the copyright holder may always distribute their works under another license, they cannot retroactivly change the license on previous releases. once something is gpl'ed it always is. the author may also release it under other licenses, but the gpled version is no less valid because of it. the author may also keep future releases private but the previous GPL'ed releases can still be built upon by the comunity. GHC (or whatever) is not in any danger of disapearing. even if they wanted to close it, they could not take back the previous free version and it could become the seed for a open-source fork. John On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 01:00:33AM +0100, Alastair Reid wrote:
:) The question here is, are you (plural) really trying to write Free Software or just giving something away now, which will be closed and hogged later?
The copyright holder(s) of a piece of software is free to change which license future copies are released under. It makes no difference whether the license is GPL, BSD, Artistic, Microsoft EULA, or whatever. (This is why the gcc team insist that all copyrights on gcc patches be signed over to the FSF.)
In other words, the GPL gives no more protection against free software becoming non-free than the BSD license. The only defence against this is for the copyright owners to make a legally binding promise not to do so (as the FSF have done).
-- Alastair Reid
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