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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

If the initial license was GPL or the like, then it would prevent that, as long as they want to include any of the contributors' GPL code, they have to offer the whole package under GPL. MIT-style licenses would generally permit what you describe.

Also, they can't "unlicense" previously distributed code - if the system was previously distributed with an open source license, Amazon can use that version as the basis for a "Dumbo-compatible" cloud service without rewriting the 80% of the code as long as they're basing it on the last open release; they would only have to reimplement the new things that "Dumbo" added if they want; Amazon does not have to accept the new license if they don't need the new code and the old code with the old license fits their needs better.

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>Also, they can't "unlicense" previously distributed code

The United States allows authors (and heirs), except work-for-hires, to clawback copyright transfers and terminate licenses after 35 years on works made after 1977. This is an inalienable statutory right, which means it cannot be waived even with a contract.

That said, it may be difficult to terminate licenses in practice because open source licensing is done informally in most cases and courts haven't ruled whether this impacts the right of termination. However, copyright assignment and contributor license agreements are subject to termination.

Okay, the consequences of this paragraph (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html#203) are potentially devastating if triggered, but 35 years is quite a long time in the tech world. It would be very interesting on how such a fork could proceed once the 35 year term (measured from the grant of that licence, essentially the last day the original open source version was distributed) happens if the copyright owner issues the termination letters, but for all the recent licence switches this won't be an issue until 2050s, and in any case the users would have at least two years of warning to switch to something else or possibly make the product compliant by rewriting whatever of the original 35 year old parts are still needed.

And indeed, Amazon forked Elasticsearch from the last open-source version and is continuing independent development.

Yes that matches my understanding.

And IMO it's fair for Amazon to continue the development based off an old version. Forking is an important right in open source. Nobody who releases code as open source should expect that their code isn't forked.

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