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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Section 2 of the GPLv3 explicitly declares itself irrevocable provided the terms are complied with. I said something similar about this the other day, but: for all the things I dislike about the GPL family of licenses, this is a fundamental design goal of the GPL: nobody, not even the original creator, is supposed to be able to pull the rug out from under you once you've received something under the GPL.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that's why Salmon says it forked from a GPLv3 release of Lamson.

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> Section 2 of the GPLv3 explicitly declares itself irrevocable provided the terms are complied with.

Yes, it does say that. That doesn't actually override a law which makes it revocable at will irrespective of it's terms—the license is governed by the law, not vice versa.

Whether the GPLv3 is a gratuitous license probably depends on the circumstances of licensing in a particular case and not the text alone—its certainly possible for it to be a contract license instead, but it's not, AFAIK, clearly one in the general case.

Lots of sites that handle user-generated content have, in their terms, an irrevocable license grant to allow them to reproduce and distribute your submitted content.

Try revoking one of those and suing a site for infringement on grounds that it's impossible to grant an irrevocable license, and let me know how it turns out for you.

> Lots of sites that handle user-generated content have, in their terms, an irrevocable license grant to allow them to reproduce and distribute your submitted content.

Those are not gratuitous licenses granted by the rights holder, they are contract licenses in which the license are part of the exchange for services the site operator is providing for user.

> Try revoking one of those and suing a site for infringement on grounds that it's impossible to grant an irrevocable license,

I never said it's not possible to grant an irrevocable license. I said gratuitous licenses are revocable at will as a matter of law. I expressly noted that free software licenses are not, in all circumstances, a gratuitous.

But you never actually cited any law. Is this in a Restatement? Contract law is typically state level.

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