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Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

RoboVM tried to close the source but they made a release of a version that still had the GPL license attached to it. They didn't commit those sources to the public git.

They had to release those sources after the fact because they didn't change the license in the general release.

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That's interesting, though if you're the copyright holder and didn't complicate things with contributions from outsiders, dual licensing is fairly easy. That is, you're free to have both GPL and proprietary code mixed if you control all the contributed code.

> contributions from outsiders,

and other 3rd party GPL dependencies.

It's unclear from the article whether:

1) RoboVM had to use the GPL license because they used other people's GPL code - which they presumably pulled out / rewrote themselves in their new closed-source version

2) the author mistakenly believes that RoboVM is bound to the terms of the GPL license, or forced to offer new GPL licenses, on code they own 100%, just because they have offered GPL licenses to other people in the past

3) They released a binary and included the GPL license as part of the binary release licenses thus committing to the GPL in that release while not making the code available.

If they owned 100% of the copyright, then it still wouldn't matter. The GPL gives additional permissions, along with some restrictions / obligations, to Licensees. As copyright holder you are not a Licensee.

You do not need to grant yourself a license to distribute your own works. You always had that right.

Besides, who would sue you? The only person who has standing is the copyright holder. You're gonna sue yourself because you failed to honor the terms of a license, which was granted from yourself to yourself?

If they didn't own 100%, then see 1).

Feel free to check their old Google group. It's still around somewhere.

If they're the authors of the code they didn't have to do anything they didn't want to.

Well some of that code had a license that obligated them to, not kosher y'know

The article makes it sound as thought their own license forced them to release their own code. This could have only happened if the project had outside GPL'd code integrated into it, but then they wouldn't be able to legally change the license without removing that GPL'd code.

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