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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't (one of) the points of the GPL that you cannot change the licensing of the software?

The copyright holder can do anything they want with the license of the software, including change it. What has been released under older versions of the license cannot be taken back, as millions of people received the software under the old license...so if you received a version of Emacs under GPL v2, you have every right to continue to distribute it under the terms of that license, and you have no ability to alter those terms (since you are not the copyright holder). But, the GNU foundation (who holds the copyright for Emacs and all GNU software) has every right to alter what license they distribute new versions of the software under.

A lot of people have a lot of weird superstitions about the GPL. It's probably useful to read the license sometime. It may also be useful to acquire a basic understanding of copyright law, if you are a software developer.

Short answer: Not quite.

Long answer: One of the conditions for contributing code to the GNU project is assigning copyright to the FSF. That means they're legally the sole copyright holders for all software they distribute. The official reason for this is so they can pursue GPL violations in court without involving the actual authors of the code. It also permits them to change the license on any of their software. Finally, there are various reasons they might be able to do this anyway even if they didn't have the copyright assignment rule, so long as the new restrictions didn't conflict with whatever license the original software was distributed under.

So, in theory, FSF can overnight change the license of all GNU softwares to shareware and sell them?

That's really fucked up. (I trust they won't do such a thing, but I didn't think such a thing could be possible)

They can change how they license it from this moment on - but any copies they've already licensed continue to be licensed the way they were.

So if they licensed it to you as GPL, and then say "From now on, shareware is the way forward!" then you can continue to share yours as GPL, fork it, etc.

Well it's more likely than you might think over a span of a couple decades...

But, I think if they were to go rogue it would be a matter of forking a GPL-licensed version of the software and continuing development on that under an open license.

I don't think it is likely at all even in decades, and if they did they would be sued by loads of contributors for violating their binding promise to adhere with free software spirit in future licenses. You get some guarantees when you assign your copyright to the FSF.

And all this is ignoring that most GNU programs are licensed under a GPL variant and any future version, so they would not need the copyright to upgrade the license anyway.

I'm not saying it's a thing that's going to happen, just that you shouldn't have some blind faith that it won't ("I trust they won't do such a thing"). I'm pretty sure RMS would agree with the sentiment.

If you hold the copyright, new versions can be under whatever license you want. Old versions cannot have their license changed.

Basically all FSF-curated projects ask for contributors to assign copyright to the FSF. Which means the FSF ends up owning the rights to all the code, and can (as the copyright holder) switch to a different license for new versions.

We think that stinks and is unfair to contributors. We can understand giving a license to use, but complete ownership is unfair and unreasonable.

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