Irrevocable GPL

Posted Feb 4, 2008 22:30 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Good question. You are right, there is nothing in the text of the GPLv2 which speaks about perpetuity or revocability. I would think that such concepts are implicit in the text in that there are explicit provisions to terminate it and revoke it; if certain conditions are met, then the license is always valid.

Do these concepts of "perpetual and irrevocable" need to be explicit? I'm not sure. The answer probably lies in whatever is customary in the industry. If many licenses are explicitly "perpetual", then any license which does not contain the term will not be considered as such by the parties implied; and so with irrevocable. Anyway, there is no harm to adding it to the license if it clarifies it further.

I'm still not a lawyer.