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Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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.

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.

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