Re: [HACKERS] Re: Copyright

On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Tom Lane wrote:

> The worst-case possible scenario is that Marc goes around the bend
> and, five minutes before the release of version 7.42, announces that
> 7.42 will be distributed under new terms that everyone else thinks are
> too tight.  Everyone else just flips him the bird, goes back to 7.41
> and continues on with life.  (Furthermore, if anyone felt like suing,
> such a last-minute switcheroo would never hold up in court.  Anyone
> who had contributed code to 7.42 under the reasonable expectation that
> it would be licensed just like 7.41 would have plenty of grounds to
> say "wait a minute, where do you think you're going with my code?")

Actually, given that scenario, it wouldn't even a matter of going back to
7.41 ... everything in CVS, so you'd go back to the source tree as of the
date before the license changed ...

IMHO, the worst thing *anyone* organization could do is change the license
in such a way as to alienate the only thing of value ... the developers
*shrug*