Shane Isbell wrote: [...] > The case that I am talking about is when the original author accepts > contributions from the community but then licenses the entire work under a > commercial license or even adds additional non open-source features.
This is getting way off topic, but this can't actually happen --- only the copyright assignee can change a license, and by default that's the author. Unless you reassign copyright, *you* own your contributions. (This is why changing the license of an open source project is such an utter pain; you have to track down all the contributors and get them to agree to the change. This is why the FSF official projects will only accept contributions if you reassign copyright to them.) So if you send a contribution back to the original author and they try to close source it, that's a violation, and you can take them to court. However --- if your license allows, they *can* do is to change the license of their stuff (which they can do), and distribute it and your contribution together. The BSD license allows this; the GPL doesn't. Even if this does happen, you can't change a license retroactively, so the last version before the license change remains open source and redistributable. There have been several cases of the authors of an open source project taking their project closed source and commercial... and the community instantly forking the last open source project, being wildly successful, and watching while the original authors' commercial enterprise fails utterly. -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my │ telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out │ how to use my telephone." --- Bjarne Stroustrup
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