this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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As a user, or a developer? As a user, I don't think it matters. As a developer, I think other licenses have similar carve outs, e.g. the GPLv3 section 8 is a whole section on "termination" - the copyright holder can revoke your rights for any ticky-tack violation of the license, and at their discretion, the revocation can be permanent.
Additionally, even with other FOSS licenses, the copyright holder can re-license the project. If I had to guess, this ability to re-license is probably why it is written as it is - the license is called the "FUTO Temporary License." I would assume it's written as is so they can re-license later, and they just want to cover their bases now. It's entirely possible that's incorrect, and they'll clamp down. I'm personally willing to give them the benefit of the doubt (though having said that, I have no intention of buying, using, or contributing to this project).
the GPL revocation requires violating the license terms and it's a clause just to prevent people from using GPL code and not giving back their code. The GPL allows your fiercest competitor or enemy country to use your code and you can't revoke the license as long as they publish their code too.
the FUTO license can revoke the license just because Rossmann says so. It is a mechanism to keep Rossmann the owner of everything that spawns from the code of the app and being the only one who can make money from it. If Rossmann doesn't like someone who wants to redistributes the app, he can immediately revoke their license. Which is fine for a proprietary app. The issue is that he keep calling it "open source".
This is not true. The GPL does not force anyone to give up their code, unless they distribute it. From the "Definitions" section:
And
And from the "Basic Permissions" section:
Under the terms of the GPL, the owner can revoke your access for any violation of the license, and at their discretion, they can make that revocation permanent. The GPL does not guarantee equal treatment - an author can punish one person harshly, and another not at all. It still comes down to the author. Yes, there is a small barrier in that you have to find a violation, but if you look hard enough, you can probably find a violation - especially in large projects using libraries distributed under multiple different licenses.
Quoting from my comment here:
This is not true. You can make and sell plugins, you could offer support, you could sell your services as a code auditor/security expert... anything other than selling the code you didn't write. On top of that, in practice, this isn't different from anything else - most contributors to open source projects don't profit from them, unless they work for the organization that owns the project. When the non-owners do profit, it's usually big companies and results in the license changes I've described above.
Re-licensing the project means future releases go out under a new license. Past releases remain as they are, because they are non-revokable (unless breached; but let's be real, if you breach an agreement you should stop benefiting from it).
Both. A user that doesn't care about licensing is typically called a pirate.
The license literally does not govern the usage of the app. Here's the first line:
Read the entire license (it's only 32 lines), and you won't find anything related to using the product, only the code.
This license should only be scary to developers, who might build on the project, and then have it taken away. As a user, your concerns are different, and this license vs the GPL, or any other FOSS, or even source available license, are more-or-less the same. As a user, your primary concerns are probably going to be related to the security and privacy related aspects, and as long as you have access to the source, you can audit it and ensure it meets your standards. If they choose to revoke access to the code, as a user, you're in the same boat you described - don't take new versions because you can't audit them, but you can stay on the old version. They can't revoke that access with this license, because again, this license literally does not govern usage of the product.