The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code

Re:The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code by colejohnson66 on Monday November 23, 2020 @12:23PM (#25189108)

There’s also the problem that many of the older contributors probably aren’t reachable at the email address attached to the commit. They may even be dead in which case you’d need to find who the copyright transferred to (next of kin? Did the will give it someplace else?), and get their permission.

They certainly could mandate that all new contributions are licensed as GPL2+, not the GPL2-only a lot of it is under. Then, after an eternity, when every bit is now GPL2+ (either by relicensing or rewriting), mandate all new commits are GPL3+. Then the only way to use it would be to rip out the GPL3+ parts (if you want GPL2 terms) or to use the GPL3.

Simple!

Except not really...

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Re:The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code by ghaff on Monday November 23, 2020 @12:40PM (#25189331)

This was something I wrote at the time. https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-... (Unfortunately, the original article referenced seems to be lost to the mists of time.)

The theory I guess is that, even absent a contributor license agreement, contributors to the kernel are effectively contributing to a collective work and that the project as a whole could make changes even if individual contributors did not agree.

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