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What happens when a GPL app is relicensed?
by William Wise on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @20:33
What happens if, say, I'm using a GPL app called kdegplapp version 2.1 and the original author and copyright holder decides to relicense to a proprietary license? Can I branch the code at 2.1 and continue to develop the codebase? Can the author retroactively decide that I can't use the application? I'm confused as to what the implications are...

Will
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Re: What happens when a GPL app is relicensed?
by me on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @21:30
yes you can take the last GPL version and fork it and do what you want with it
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  • Re: What happens when a GPL app is relicensed?
    by jd on Monday 03/Sep/2001, @07:23
    ... except relicense it, naturally... :)
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Re: What happens when a GPL app is relicensed?
by Neil Conway on Thursday 30/Aug/2001, @21:58
No, you can fork the project at any point you like. License changes cannot be retroactively applied: if I release version 0.0.1 under the GPL, that version is permanently under that license (of course, I can release 0.0.1a which is exactly the same, only under a different license -- but that has no effect on the licensing or distribution terms of version 0.0.1). This has happened before -- for example, OpenSSH is based off a (very) old version of SSH, before the license changed to become commercial. A copy of the old version was still available so the OpenBSD people used that -- and SSH Inc. couldn't stop them.
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