Christopher A. Woodfield wrote:
I'm presuming we're talking about BSD-style licenses here - with the GPL, AFAIK, the code cannot be "closed" once it's open, as any derivitive works must also be released under the GPL.
-C
You can pretty much always change your licensing terms, if you are the origional owner of the entire code. Now, if you've accepted other people's contributions/patches/etc into your codebase, and decide to change the license, especially away from one that implies future perpetuation, then you get into hairy territory. But I can write a "Hello world" program, GPL it, then change that to BSD or Artistic or even "nobody else can ever use the newer code, so nyah", so long as I have total control over the codebase (IE, I wrote it all, or it was explicitly assigned to me). Of course, if I want to enforce that in any way, the new code probably has to be demonstrably different than the old code (you have to be able to prove it wasn't just compiled from an open copy of the old code). The "cannot be closed once it's open" applies to almost all of the open source licenses, in that they are written so that you cannot *revoke* someone's right to use an existing release, or their license to make changes, redistributed, et al (whatever else you permit). Again, it normally requires a new version release to change the license, and if you want it to be at all enforceable, there has to be a code difference that can be used to prove it. This doesn't get into what happens if I've contracted to let someone else use it, which is a completely different ball of wax, of course. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer