What are the licenses of the code provided? [LWN.net]

What are the licenses of the code provided?

Posted Apr 7, 2016 11:20 UTC (Thu) by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
In reply to: What are the licenses of the code provided? by drag
Parent article: A single Node of failure

It's just a example. Cyberax jumped ahead in terms of logical consequences of the discussion. A copyright owner isn't restricted by his own copyright. Thus any copyright license he has isn't going to restrict what he can do with his own code.

From the FL:

2. Basic Permissions. All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.

This is for the GPL v3). See the "irrevocable" up there? The GPL v2 hasn't such a clarification as far as I can see, but still names no restrictions on your right to distribute code other than the well-known copyleft restrictions. This would cover Cyberax's example. I don't think other free (or any!) licenses allow revoking the rights granted unless explicitly stated. So no, the copyright holder can't (retroactively) take the right from you it has granted you in the first place. Now releasing new versions with a different license would be fair game, but this isn't what we are talking about here. Therefore I think that yes, an explicit license would help here.