Jed Shaw claims revoking GPL is possible, demands fork relicense as BSD

The headline says "demands fork relicense as BSD" (Murphy's law guarantees that HN mods will change it), but Lamson's new license ( https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson/blob/master/LICENSE ) is not BSD. It has some creative clauses: "4. Contributors agree that any contributions are owned by the copyright holder and that contributors have absolutely no rights to their contributions. 5. The copyright holder reserves the right to revoke this license on anyone who uses this copyrighted work at any time for any reason."

In every case where a non-lawyer has a contradicting legal opinion as to those of the legal profession (ie, actually lawyers), one should be a bit careful before acting. Zed Shaw is a non-lawyer who thinks that a license which itself is says is non-revokable, is revokable. Several certified lawyers strongly disagree with Zeds opinion.

The best action to do is to follow the style of Wikipedia in cases like this. Do exactly nothing. do not reply, do not engage or act in any way different from before. Simply just call a lawyer (or fsf, or eff, or sflc), and let those whoes job it is to deal with legal threat, deal with the legal threat.

That is Zed (not Jed) Shaw.

And the idea that a gratuitous license is revocable by notice alone at any time is decidedly not new (its fairly well established law.)

The effect of that revocation on the position of the licensor vis-a-vis those who had relied upon the license prior to the revocation, given the doctrine of promissory estoppel, is a little more complicated.