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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Yeah. That's a pretty shitty license to move to for endusers and others. Disallowing derivatives, etc. is within their rights but, really a dick move but, considering this commit message, not surprising.
It's actually not within their rights (I am NOT a lawyer)
GPL code is still owned by the person who wrote it, that includes contributors who have made a PR. Unless they all signed CLAs (Contributor License Agreements) to hand over their copyright to the repository owner, the repository owner does not hold copyright for this code, and as such can't legally change the license. They can use and distribute it as specified in the license terms of the GPL, but that excludes changing the license.
That’s true, but only contributors have standing to do something about it. Unless there are contributors with contributions that are not easily patched out that are willing to make a case out of it, we’re stuck with the last GPL version.
There's a GPL compliance lawsuit where they're suing NOT as a copyright holder of contrubtor's code but as a user of the software (a 3rd party beneficiary, under contract law). The GPL was intended to give standing to users of the software, so hopeful this makes presidence.
Yes, but this suit about a different matter (access to source code) which is a user right in the license. It’s the whole point of the GPL. In this suit the users (ie. The buyers of the devices that have received the binary distribution) obviously have standing.
The problem with relicensing is that the “authors” of a creative work (remember, this is copyright law) are changing the terms of the distribution, and the authors are allowed to do that. The issue at hand is whether the person doing the changing of the terms is allowed to make this change on behalf of “the authors”.
The users may be impacted by this decision, but they are not a part of the decision making process. Hence, no standing.
What you need in a relicensing is someone that asserts (co-) authorship of the work. That’s a much taller order.
Exactly. It isn't clear if duckstations author really has permission from all contributors or rewrote those contributions he didn't have rights to change the license on. If he didn't then technically even the latest version is still GPL but it's fairly murky and I doubt shy sane person wants to fork it and have all that drama.
I remember the maintainer claiming they had permission from all contributors to change the license but I can't find a link to it now.