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by Macha 1258 days ago
Like, if Wizards does get their way here, it seems like a death knell for the MIT, GPLv2 and BSD licenses in their current form. It would render them unwise to use in commercial code or as referenced dependencies of open source codebase as the author could revoke it any time, as well as invalid to incorporate MIT or BSD code into GPLv3 or Apache 2.0 licensed projects as you do not have the permission to grant an irrevocable license to your sublicensees
1 comments
tptacek 1258 days ago
No: the irrevocability of the mainstream FOSS licenses has already been tested.

People are doing a lot of axiomatic reasoning on this thread: "FOSS works this way, so the WOTC license should work similarly". Nope! Your best bet is probably just to go read actual legal analyses (that's all I'm doing, reading and relaying things).

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Macha 1258 days ago
The legal analyses I've found fall on one of two sides:

1. IP licenses, especially one sided take it or leave it licenses, are revocable, sometimes even if the license expressly says otherwise because of restrictions on perpetuities.

2. A license turns into a contract when there is consideration from the other side. Licensing your own work under a license because of a virality/share-alike clause has mixed reactions on if its consideration but more fall on the side that it is than it isn't.

Neither of these positions would seem to be to distinguish the OGL from GPLv2 here, and position 2 would set a position where OGL is not revocable but MIT/BSD are.

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tptacek 1258 days ago
Yep, that's the optimistic argument as I understand it.
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