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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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yes you can!
...for new versions. not for already released ones.
at least not with most common copyleft/open source licenses.
edit: assuming a solo project. see below.
Only if you are the sole contributor or get a written consent from all contributors. GPL doesn't hand over the copyright to the maintainer.
yes, correct, assuming a solo project!
thank you for the correction.
Well yes and no you can release them going forward under a new licence. If you obtained your copy under the old license you can use it under the old license when you obtain a new copy you have a new license agreement. Thats absolutly possible to do.
Revoking licenses is alot harder though and changing the lizens from a foss on to another is often confusing and business inapropiate. However it is legal.
Edit: A license is for not vopyright owners not the copyright holder. The copyright holder can basically do whatever they want.
yes and no:
the copyright owner can do whatever they want, but they can't really revoke a GPL license. that's not really a thing.
and the part about
seems to me like you are implying that "use under the old license" means "run the program on my own machine", but that's not true, since GPL explicitly allows redistribution and modification.
under a GPL license, you effectively give up control over your software voluntarily:
(highlighted the relevant portion for your convenience)
this makes revoking the license effectively impossible.
you could continue development under a different license, but that gets legally tricky very quickly.
for example: all the code previously under GPL, stays under GPL. so if someone where to modify those parts of the code and redistribute it as a patch, you couldn't legally do anything about that.
which seems to be what the OOP claims the change to a CC-BY-NC-ND forbids, apparently misunderstanding, that this new license only applies to code added to the repo since the license change, not the code from before the license change.