What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Karl Fogel]

Eugene Wee <crystalrecursion at gmail.com> writes:
> Perhaps the worry is that Canonical, being the copyright holder, can
> indeed suddenly make all copies of Bazaar in the world proprietary. It
> appears that some experts have argued on this possibility in the past,
> as claimed here:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/347236/
> though on that same page is an assertion that precedent has been
> established in US law such that the expert opinion is outdated. On the
> other hand, it may be the case that this could be the problem in other
> jurisdictions, e.g., I have no idea of what the law is on this point
> in Singapore.

Sure, a good lawyer can at least try to argue any side, no matter how
farfetched.  And sometimes they'll do it on the Internet :-).  But I'm
not aware of any serious concern in the free software legal community
that freely-licensed stuff can be retroactively unfreed.

See Bruce Perens's comment on that article:

  The Volokh and Moglen comments don't apply any longer because the
  appeal in Jacobsen v. Katzer established a precedent. They were
  speaking before that happened. By the way, I think the quote you are
  concerned with is of Volokh, not Moglen.

  I'd like to see this tried.  A person gets a license that claims to be
  irrevocable and has a reasonable expectation that it is. An assign of
  the copyright holder then claims that the license the copyright holder
  conveyed doesn't apply due to the assign's arbitrary decision.

  Good luck with that :-) 

-Karl