[License-discuss] Can a contributor take back open source code ?

[Brendan Hickey]

Can a license be terminated under section 203 (
https://www.copyright.gov/docs/203.html) after twenty five years?

A contributor can also make life difficult for users. After a spat with the
Belgian government, the author of iText changed the license to the AGPL and
started making threats against users of older versions.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 06:25 Kevin P. Fleming <kevin+osi at km6g.us> wrote:

> If the contributions were legitimately provided under an OSI-approved (or
> similar) license, the license cannot be terminated for convenience. As a
> result, anyone who received the code under that license can continue to
> exercise all of the rights granted by the license (distribution,
> modification, etc.) as long as they wish to do so.
>
> Of course the contributor can request that the project remove their
> contributions, and the project can choose to do so, but there is no path
> which would force the project to do so.
>
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 5:49 AM Antoine Thomas <
> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello dear OSI members,
>>
>> I have a "not easy" question: is it possible for a contributor to remove
>> his contributions (code, translations, ...) from an open source project?
>> And, if someone do that, is it possible for the project to continue to
>> maintain the previous version, thanks to the license? (I mean, before the
>> deletion)
>>
>> What copyright tells about this kind of situation? Are there some
>> experience already? While it is easy to find blog articles, there is no
>> clear statement on OSI and FSF websites on this touchy topic.
>>
>> A few articles:
>> - https://hackaday.com/2018/09/27/can-you-take-back-open-source-code/
>> -
>> https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happens-if-you-try-to-take-your-code-out-of-linux/
>>
>> It seems that it's not really possible, but I would like to be sure.
>> Could someone help me? In our case at PrestaShop, the project is
>> distributed in OSL. I am currently reading it again to check if there is a
>> part about this topic.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Antoine
>>
>>
>> [image: PrestaShop]
>> <https://www.prestashop.com/?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=emails-signatures>
>>
>> Antoine Thomas aka ttoine
>>
>> Developer Advocate
>>
>> t: +33 (0)6 63 13 79 06
>>
>> antoine.thomas at prestashop.com
>>
>>
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>>
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>>
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