In the scenario I've constructed, yes.
The trick is that you don't need to threaten everybody, just any fork that gains traction and might be a viable open source project.
Otherwise stated, you don't go after every user, just the competition.
The trick is that you don't need to threaten everybody, just any fork that gains traction and might be a viable open source project.
Otherwise stated, you don't go after every user, just the competition.
Sure you can fork it and license new code in a different way, but that’s not the same thing.
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve followed the “is it a license or is it a contract” thing for 25 years now. One important part of the confusion here is that a contract requires mutual consideration; unilateral “contracts” aren’t contracts at all. The long-term argument is that the source code is subject to copyright which implicitly would not allow distribution; the license is what grants additional permissions on top of what copyright does and doesn’t allow, and thus probably could be revoked.