John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
One thing people forget is that Trolltech still controls the copyright
on Qt. It can legally revoke the GPL license on Qt *any time it chooses*.
Any copyright holder can revoke/change the licensing at any time. What
they cannot do is retroactively change it.
They can't come back and sue you for having used code in the past.
However, they can prevent you from using it any more in the future.
If Trolltech pulls the Qt license, Qt usage stops immediately.
This has happened before, with the resultant fork. Think SSH.com vs.
OpenSSH.
Really? I'm pretty sure that OpenSSH couldn't use *any* code from
SSH.com. That's not a fork; that's a complete rewrite. OpenBSD has had
to do that for a few things. OpenSSH being one; pf being another.
A fork requires that the *license* doesn't change (or changes to
something compatible with forking). In the case of most projects, the
license change is prevented by the fact that a large number of people
hold individual copyrights on lots of pieces and would all have to give
their consent.
If, however, a single entity holds the copyright, it's easy to make that
change.
-a
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