removing permission to distribute? [LWN.net]

removing permission to distribute?

Posted Oct 29, 2003 18:33 UTC (Wed) by jmason (guest, #13586)
Parent article: Catching up with SCO

As a matter of interest -- if a developer discovers that a company are bundling their open-source licensed software, and they maintain copyright on that code, is it possible for them to *withdraw* that company's permission to distribute that code?

AFAIK, the copyright holder on the code still maintains the right to make the terms; although on the other hand, they would have already given a right to use it through the open-source license, regardless of whether or not the licensee is busy attempting to destroy that license directly at the same time. ;)

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Removing permission to distribute?

Posted Oct 30, 2003 17:28 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

No, they can not. The deal is the deal. They can do this with help of court if they can somehow prove that they made code in question free by mistake but it's very hard.

Of course it's easy to make new version non-free and old one will slowly become irrelevant... unless someone pick up the pieces and go from there (see origanl ssh (now non-free) vs openssh :-)