Re: Please explain the FSF copyright assignment thing

[Yuri Khan]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 3:15 AM, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:

>> One specific case is if you yourself go evil and decide to stop
>> distributing your package freely and make it non-free. As a copyright
>> holder, you legally can do that.
>
> If I'm the copyright owner, and I decide to release the next version as
> proprietary, I'm of course able to do that.
>
> That shouldn't stop FSF from distributing the previous version of the
> software, though, because it's been released under a Free Software license
> already. So protecting against this scenario doesn't seem necessary.

Yes, but the free previous version is likely to be at a disadvantage
against the now-non-free version led by the original developer. It
will have a much reduced user base.

> Also IANAL.

(Me too.)