[H-GEN] GPL -> Non-GPL licence change

[Michael Anthon]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

A question has arisen in my mind that I am unable to resolve with the
knowledge I have on licence issues.  The situation is as follows.

Someone has written an application, say UBeautProgram and released it under
the GPL as version 1.0.  Other people say "hey, this is great!" and thereby
set about working on this application, adding features, fixing bugs and a
lot of this is submitted back to the original author and is incorporated
into the application.

The author then releases version 2.0 of UBeautProgram and says "Hey, I've
now decided that this will be licenced under the QPL and if you want to use
it for commercial purposes you have to pay me money".

My question is this.  Where does this leave the other people that have
contributed code into the code base for this project?   Can the author
actually change from the GPL like this without violating the GPL?

Cheers
Michael


--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/