

Jed Shaw claims revoking GPL is possible, demands fork relicense as BSD - BCM43
https://github.com/moggers87/salmon/issues/8

======
wmf
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](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."

------
belorn
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.

------
dragonwriter
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.

