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Let's consider following scenario:

  1. Person A creates a piece of software and releases the source code under a permissive license, let's say MIT
  2. Person B downloads that piece of software and uses it accoridingly to MIT license.
  3. As an owner and holder of all the right Person A decides to change the license from MIT to other license, especially less permissive one like GPL. For simplicity let's assume that there were no contributions to the piece of software in the meantimy by any other people.
  4. Person A releases a new version of the software

In that scenario what happens to the rights given to the person B?

  • Is person B allowed to still use the last version released before the change of the license under the old license (MIT) and all the versions released after change of the license as new license (GPL)?
  • Is the entire piece of software licensed MIT or GPL after the change?
  • Basically can rights given by license be revoked by the owner?
Mariusz Jamro
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1 Answers1

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IANAL, but the guy who wrote this article is.

The conclusion he makes is that until it has actually been through court and precedents has been set, it is not clear that a license cannot be revoked. And the really big problem is that any decision might be dependent on the jurisdiction. You could imagine a situation where a user is in the US uses a piece of software made in the EU, the license is revoked, but US court says it cannot be reworked and the EU court says it can.

One of the main points is that there is not established a contract, because the user of the software has not bought it. If there were a specific contract between the copyright holders and the users (even without transfers of funds), that point would likely go away, but that requires a contract in each specific case.

So the current answer is, that even if it states in the license that it cannot be revoked, then it is not certain that it cannot, because of the lack of a specific contract.

Glorfindel
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Bent
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