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Just Curious, Can you change the license on an OSS project?

By Kurt Blane - Mar. 06, 2008

Is there any kind of provision to change the OSS license on a particular project. For example, can Drupal (now that its raised capital) change its license to a "closed source"/proprietary license? Just curious on the legalities of the license...


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  1. By Kurt Blane on Mar. 06, 2008

    I don't think you can do that. The whole GPL is devoted to ensure that this doesn't happen.


    From the Mambo license page - "You MAY distribute it and charge for that service. You MAY change it, add design and content to it and you MAY charge for that. You may NOT alter the license and you must NOT alter the copyright."


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  2. By an anonymous user on Mar. 06, 2008

    Well, you can do this for other licenses, right. I mean, LGPL and Apache are extremely flexible. You can change and re-ship the code, even under a proprietary license. Each license has its own nuances.


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  3. By an anonymous user on Mar. 12, 2008

    Drupal is not closed source. After DrupalCon 2008 in Boston last week Aquia, the new drupal startup, had to make this point over and over. They are going to sell their own supported version ala Red Hat, but Drupal is still very much GPL'd.

    Here is a great post to that effect http://jeff.viapositiva.net/archives/2006/02/drupal_and_the_gpl_as_i_und...


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  4. By an anonymous user on Mar. 12, 2008

    Drupal is not closed source. After DrupalCon 2008 in Boston last week Aquia, the new drupal startup, had to make this point over and over. They are going to sell their own supported version ala Red Hat, but Drupal is still very much GPL'd.

    Here is a great post to that effect http://jeff.viapositiva.net/archives/2006/02/drupal_and_the_gpl_as_i_und...


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  5. By an anonymous user on Mar. 12, 2008

    Drupal is not closed source. After DrupalCon 2008 in Boston last week Aquia, the new drupal startup, had to make this point over and over. They are going to sell their own supported version ala Red Hat, but Drupal is still very much GPL'd.

    Here is a great post to that effect http://jeff.viapositiva.net/archives/2006/02/drupal_and_the_gpl_as_i_und...


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  6. By an anonymous user on Mar. 17, 2008

    If you own the rights to all of the code in an opensource project then, yes, you can change the license. There are several examples of this in the past. Nessus is an example of this.


    The issue comes in when you don't own the rights to all of the code. Creating a proprietary Linux kernel would be virtually impossible.


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  7. By an anonymous user on Mar. 17, 2008

    If you own the rights to all of the code in an opensource project then, yes, you can change the license. There are several examples of this in the past. Nessus is an example of this.


    The issue comes in when you don't own the rights to all of the code. Creating a proprietary Linux kernel would be virtually impossible.


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  8. By Daniel Koffler on Mar. 17, 2008

    If you own the rights to the code in question, you can change the license -- but there are caveats.


    As Stephan O'Graddy points out here http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2008/03/16/open-source-licensing-obsolete-or-... there are certain rights and privileges you cannot revoke regardless of whether you are moving to a more permissive or restrictive license.


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