Just to clear up a bit about licenses and copyright.
Copyright is akin to property rights. If you have the copyright to a piece of work, you own the work. You can do whatever you want with it. License it in one way or another, etc...
In the case of Canonical Copyright assignment, for every contribution:
- the author of the contribution keeps full copyright over his work. He can, for example, license it differently to some other project at any time (until he dies or copyright expires, at which points it becomes public domain).
- Canonical gains conditional, shared copyright over the contribution.
License is a set of rights given by a copyright owner, to a given individual or group of person. Theses rights mostly concern use, modification, redistribution, merchantability, etc..
The copyright owner can provide multiple licenses to multiple overlapping groups. If a user has multiple licenses for the use of a given work, he can choose any license he wants, and is not bound by the licenses he is not using.
=> A company that has access to the code through the GPL license and a (payed for) non-transferable permissive license is not bound by the GPL.
Licenses (as opposed to contracts) are revokable. It is not known if the OSS licenses (GPL, MIT, BSD, etc...) can be revoked, as it has never been tried in court (almost happened, once, but they settled before judgement). Maybe yes, maybe not. Probably not easily, and not everywhere, and well, nobody managed it yet.
By any means, you would need all the copyright holders to revoke the license (and a court to find that legal) to completely close a project.
In the case of Canonical, it means the original contributor must do the same.
But actually, as Canonical promises in a contract to license the contribution with its original licenses (the licenses they were using at the time of submission), it actually means that even if the contributor tried to revoke it, Canonical couldn't.
So, what can be done by canonical:
- license a contribution as closed-source, modify the contribution without licensing the modifications under GPL. Basically, fork the contribution under closed-source. The contributor can do the same, but only for his work, not the full
what cannot be done:
- revoke GPL license to the contribution, ie retroactively close source the entire project. There is a yet untested risk that they could retroactively close their own code, but that's not Canonical specific.
Copyright is akin to property rights. If you have the copyright to a piece of work, you own the work. You can do whatever you want with it. License it in one way or another, etc...
In the case of Canonical Copyright assignment, for every contribution:
- the author of the contribution keeps full copyright over his work. He can, for example, license it differently to some other project at any time (until he dies or copyright expires, at which points it becomes public domain).
- Canonical gains conditional, shared copyright over the contribution.
License is a set of rights given by a copyright owner, to a given individual or group of person. Theses rights mostly concern use, modification, redistribution, merchantability, etc..
The copyright owner can provide multiple licenses to multiple overlapping groups. If a user has multiple licenses for the use of a given work, he can choose any license he wants, and is not bound by the licenses he is not using.
=> A company that has access to the code through the GPL license and a (payed for) non-transferable permissive license is not bound by the GPL.
Licenses (as opposed to contracts) are revokable. It is not known if the OSS licenses (GPL, MIT, BSD, etc...) can be revoked, as it has never been tried in court (almost happened, once, but they settled before judgement). Maybe yes, maybe not. Probably not easily, and not everywhere, and well, nobody managed it yet.
By any means, you would need all the copyright holders to revoke the license (and a court to find that legal) to completely close a project.
In the case of Canonical, it means the original contributor must do the same.
But actually, as Canonical promises in a contract to license the contribution with its original licenses (the licenses they were using at the time of submission), it actually means that even if the contributor tried to revoke it, Canonical couldn't.
So, what can be done by canonical:
- license a contribution as closed-source, modify the contribution without licensing the modifications under GPL. Basically, fork the contribution under closed-source. The contributor can do the same, but only for his work, not the full
what cannot be done:
- revoke GPL license to the contribution, ie retroactively close source the entire project. There is a yet untested risk that they could retroactively close their own code, but that's not Canonical specific.
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