How to prevent bait and switch to happen with tech articles license?
How to prevent bait and switch to happen with tech articles license?
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Singularity Hub used to publish all their content under Creative Commons and that had even earned them a place in the Creative Commons Wiki.
Today I checked up on the website only to see that they changed their articles license to a propitiatory one. https://singularityhub.com/
How to guarantee that when I choose a website that publish articles under Creative Commons, that they will not change their license?
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I may be wrong with creative commons but doesn't it work the same with the gpl. They can relicenae it inder a different license if they own the copyright but you still have access to the version under the first license.
You can totally do it with the GPL as well, as long as you own 100% od the copyright. Of you accept a patch, and don't get copyright attribution... You're stuck with the GPL forever.
stuck with the GPL forever
If you accept a patch and don’t have the ability to relicense it, you can remove it and re-license the new codebase. You can even re-implement changes made by the patch in many cases, whether those changes are bug fixes or new features.
If you re-implement the change, you do need to ensure this is done in a way that doesn’t cause it to become a derivative work, but it’s much easier if you have copyright to 99% of a work already and only need to re-implement 1% or so. If you’ve received substantial community contributions and the community is opposed to relicensing, it will be much harder to do so.
A clean room implementation - where the person rewriting the code doesn’t look at the original code, and is only given a description of the functionality - which can include a detailed description of the algorithm - is the most defensible way to perform such a rewrite and relicense, but it’s not the only option.
You should generally consult an attorney when relicensing and shouldn’t just do it casually. But a single patch certainly doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever.