[bitwize]

Yes, it has been argued, but has it been ruled so in a court of law?

The answer is no -- just the opposite. In Jacobsen v. Katzer it was ruled that the Artistic License is not a contract, and the licensor could seek damages for copyright infringement, not just breach of contract. In Artifex v. Hancom it was ruled that because the defendants did not agree to the contract terms for a proprietary license, the terms defaulted to the GPL which they were found in violation of as a license, not a contract.

And if a license is not a contract then it is a bare license and can be rescinded at any time for any reason.

[michaelmrose]

I thought the problem with that argument was one part promissory estoppel and one part non-monetary consideration. EG you realized something under the GPL with expectation that said work would serve to for instance help you get a job later by demonstrating your work and users by submitting bug reports, code, endorsements helped you achieve the expected goals by making your work more visible and credible.

I'm not aware of any case in which for instance someone has successfully defended their right to rescind a license to the GPL license code they granted in history. A pragmatic court given 2 plausible interpretations with some merit isn't obligated to endorse an interpretation with an obviously negative effect they're people not CPUs interpreting code.

A timeline where we need a GPLv4 to cover the case of assholes taking back their shit contrary to decades of expectations and leaving mission critical v2 projects like Linux constantly at risk of a 10,000 time bombs from heirs taking back daddy's code is clearly the dumbest of all possible worlds and we are under no obligation to live there if their is a reasonable out.

My money is on this theory remaining a fairy tale until someone actually spends enough money to test it and its dissolved forever by actual case law.

Artifex Software, Inc. v. Hancom, Inc. which was ultimately settled out of court seems to have found the exact opposite of what you said if I read this correctly.

https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/breach-gpl-...

Jacobsen v. Katzer is a complicated affair but regardless of your interpretations it certainly doesn't concern the revocation of a bare license. Most of the action seems to concern whether the party could get damages.

[gamblor956]

In Artifex v. Hancom it was ruled that because the defendants did not agree to the contract terms for a proprietary license, the terms defaulted to the GPL which they were found in violation of as a license, not a contract.

This is not what the motion for summary judgment in Artifax v Hancom ruled...

The issue was not whether the GPL was a contract, but rather what the proper measure for damages should be. The Defendant argued $0 because there was no royalty owed for the GPL license, but the court ruled that the correct measure for damages of this breach of contract should probably have been the royalty that would have been paid if Defendant had entered into the commercial licensing contract which would have applied if they had entered into the proper license for their intended use of the copyrighted material. However, as this was a motion for summary judgment and not a ruling on the merits, it has no precedential value.

And with respect to Jacobsen v. Katzer, the issue was that the Plaintiff was seeking to enforce copyright infringement provisions in lieu of pursuing the infringement as a breach of contract. The Federal Appeals court ruled that a breach of an open source contract constituted both a breach of contract and also a infringement of copyright. The point of the case was to allow a second cause of action because copyright infringement claims are easier and usually more monetarily valuable to pursue than a breach of contract claim.