Re:Is Arduino no longer open-source?
by ghaff on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @09:35PM
(#14557319)
The closest case seems to be a Mattel court case involving their CyberPatrol software and a program by Eddy Jahnsson and Matthew Skala called cphack. It raised the issue of whether a GPL license could be withdrawn. However, the case was such that no definitive legal conclusion came about. (I was shocked to find that Googling directed me to something I wrote 10 years ago :-) https://www.cnet.com/news/revoking-open-source/)
However, the widespread assumption is certainly that it doesn't require a contributor license agreement to keep this whole open source thing from crashing down. Which it would if an arbitrary developer could threaten pulling out their code from some project N years later. In today's climate, it's pretty reasonable to assume that if no one has pulled that sort of blackmail, no one thinks it has legs.
However, the widespread assumption is certainly that it doesn't require a contributor license agreement to keep this whole open source thing from crashing down. Which it would if an arbitrary developer could threaten pulling out their code from some project N years later. In today's climate, it's pretty reasonable to assume that if no one has pulled that sort of blackmail, no one thinks it has legs.