I've stumbled upon some discussions lately that seem to be kind of
unexpected in the area of GPL licensing.
It turns out that a couple of the things that people have said couldn't
happen under the GPL, have happened:
First, a project actually attempted to retroactively revoke the GPL.
See:
http://sourceforge.net/developer/diary.php?diary_id=26407&diary_user=147583
Of course, whether this is legal or not is an open question. The smart
money is on not, but, of course, someone is going to have to pay the
money to fight it out. In addition, it has the possibility to raise
some thorny issues of whether the GPL is a license or a contract.
The second issue is that dual licenses aren't quite as benign as
everybody seems to think. See:
http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/why-licenses-dont-matter-and-why-they-do/
Basically, it boils down to the fact that the GPL places enough
restrictions on what you can do with software that the copyright holder
can effectively apply a shakedown that you will have to fight if you
touch non-open software anywhere in your use of the package.
Another interesting post on it is:
http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/05/exisiting-dual.html
-a
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