- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Singularity Hub used to publish all their content under Creative Commons and that had even earned them a place in the Creative Commons Wiki.
Today I checked up on the website only to see that they changed their articles license to a propitiatory one. https://singularityhub.com/
How to guarantee that when I choose a website that publish articles under Creative Commons, that they will not change their license?
You can totally do it with the GPL as well, as long as you own 100% od the copyright. Of you accept a patch, and don’t get copyright attribution… You’re stuck with the GPL forever.
If you accept a patch and don’t have the ability to relicense it, you can remove it and re-license the new codebase. You can even re-implement changes made by the patch in many cases, whether those changes are bug fixes or new features.
If you re-implement the change, you do need to ensure this is done in a way that doesn’t cause it to become a derivative work, but it’s much easier if you have copyright to 99% of a work already and only need to re-implement 1% or so. If you’ve received substantial community contributions and the community is opposed to relicensing, it will be much harder to do so.
A clean room implementation - where the person rewriting the code doesn’t look at the original code, and is only given a description of the functionality - which can include a detailed description of the algorithm - is the most defensible way to perform such a rewrite and relicense, but it’s not the only option.
You should generally consult an attorney when relicensing and shouldn’t just do it casually. But a single patch certainly doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever.