>Nonsense. The CofL are, among other things, dependent on Larry >Lessig's construction of the previous appelate court ruling in US. vs >Microsoft.
Not hardly. Lessig's brief is adressed in a footnote as *another* wayt that the conclusion might be reached, which the court *declined* to take.
>If that construction is flawed, then Judge Jackson's >finding of a section 1 violation is trashed.
Not at all. And even if it were, the section 2 findings would stand.
>Given that opinion >contained the juicy quotation concerning "allowing judges and >incompent attorneys to design software", I would suggest that >Jackson's CofL are exceedingly brittle.
??? He's not arguing for that at all. He also considers the prior appellate decsion at length. He doesn't rely on attorneys and judges, but what other firms did in fact produce and market..
I wanted to turn spare 486 boxes into exta heads for our alphas. I recalled having heard of NetBSD four or five years earlier, and went looking.
I stumbled across linux along the way, and thought that that must have been what I was after.
Later I came to realize that what I'd heard about was BSD386, and that I'd apparently combined *that* with nethack, which *was* created on the usenet (like I thought netbsd had worked) from five years further back, along with a bit of what would become GNU which was also flying around (at the ten years back stage when I had usenet access).
Then I stumbled across netbsd when I got my paws on a mac that the department would have disposed of. It was my main machine for a year or so, and when I went back to linux, I discovered that I much preferred the bsd way than the gnu stuff.
So now it's FreeBSD on my K6 at home, debian on this office box (because it doesn't have the resources to compile for itself), and an older debian on my labptop (it works, so I'm not messing wiht it).
So what is this windows thing, anyway? I know it's something about dos. Is it like the way you made a window on the screen with the Apple II, poking the borders into memory (12-15, was it???). Or is it more like CCP/M's way of dividing the screen, so that you can flip back and forth between a little screen and a big one? That was useful prior to X, but running multitasking ms-dos programs on an 8086 kind of used a lot of power. Maybe that's why it's only in CCP/M and not ms-dos?
:)
hawk, sure that that next innovation from microsoft is coming any day now . . .
We knew that microsoft had lost as soon as we read the findings of fact, which were a determination of what happened.. This just draws the only possible conclusion that could be reached from the facts: illegal conduct.
The FofF can be appealed, but the grounds are essentiall "no reasonable person could come to this conclusion from the evidence presented." This is close to impossible, and can be disregarded. The CofL can be appealed on the grounds that they're incorrect given the facts, but there's only one possible conclusion, monopoly. Analogy: he laid in wait, then tortured and killed the victim. The only possible conclusion is murder with special circumstances.
Next come the remedies, which can be appealed; MS would merely need to convince the appellate court that another remedy would be better. However, the court will usually defer to the trial court's judgment on such matters unless it's clearly on a limb, as the trial court heard the evidence and has spent much more time on the matter than the appellate court possibly can.
In short: very little room on appeal for MS, unless the judge does something *really* wierd for remedies. Breakup will be examined closely, but would likely stand. It is highly unlikely that anything short of breakup would be overturned.
There's something too that. We can't even teach lots of people.
After being at a school with several thousand foreign students, I'm inclined to believe that some of them can *never* be taught to drive.
It's not that they're foreign; it's that they've rarely been in a car before arriving in the U.S. Here (and in other developed countries) we've been in cars from birth, and flowing through traffic. That very flow is missing from these folks; it's entirely an artificial environment. There's some amount of instinct we pick up along the way. Maybe it's like language; far more easily and naturally learned while young.
As a group, those learning to drive here aren't merely worse than more experienced drivers. As a group, they seem to be worse than new drivers (as a group).
If we can't teach this to people, it's going to be really hard to teach it to a machine.
What I'd really like is to be able to *cap* the amount of IO that a process and its descendants can use. On old laptops, I'd like to cap cron and the sluggish updating that happens. On my desktop, I'd like to limit dpkg to 20% or 30% of disk (and core memory, as well) as it takes over on this old machine.
OK, I'll settle for a new machine.:)
And then there was Bad Times
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 2
I also saw a shorter version which wasn't nearly as amusing. Here it is:
If you receive an e-mail with a subject line of "Badtimes," delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous E-mail virus yet.
It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and your milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.
It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over.
It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic.
Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card.
It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of Badtimes. It reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear.
Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub.
It will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, it will refill your skim milk with whole. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold.
Lots of us thought about it for a moment, realized it was possible, saw how to do it, and then, the problem solved, lost all interest . ..
Kind of like the "Perfect Crime"--the attributes that would let one plan it correctly are the same ones that stop people from doing it . . .
Yuk, social viruses, the worst kind.
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 2
>It was more like a social virus or a thought virus.
Yuk. Social viruses. THe ones that drop into your office and drop for hours. Then they leave to infect another office, and your day is so shot by this point that you go bother someone for a couple of hours . . .
From our tech support, for crying out loud
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, the same folks who think a p120/16mb is a reasonable machine for faculty and doesn't even ened a memory upgrade because "that's enough for windows 95."
Anyway, one of them sent one of the Good Times style ones to the department. I wrote her back with the reminder that the message *is* the virus. She insisted that this one, which clamed netscape (?) had verified it and wanted you to send it to everyone was real . ..
It's hard to pin down an exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. Most of the newsgroups have become vast wastelands of spam and trolls.
A small handful of groups survived, primarily by aggressively complaining over each and every abusive posting.
Unfortunately, some ISP's (such as Demon) do not see advertising ebay auctions as actionable abuse, and it may become necessary for the surviving groups to go to a script-based moderation--allow known users to post, and hold other posts until viewed.
>I'm intruiged... are potentially confusing US laws not 'pinned down' >by case law as they are in the UK? Shouldn't a Judge be able to >declare 'the law means this' regardless of the legal abilities of >either party?
NOt necessarily (and the problem's the same in the UK, too). The notion of "stare decisis" (already decided) used to be a lot stronger-- once the highest court had ruled, the legal question could never be revisited, as the law was being "discovered" rather than created. After a few hundred years, the law had become far too rigid from this, and the courts of equity were created to get around the problem.
Our systems are adversarial by nature. The idea is that if both sides to an issue argue to the best of their ability, the truth will come out. But what if the best argument--the one that would have carried the day-- is never made? The case is wrongly decided under this circumstance.
Today, US courts (and I think UK courts) can decide that older caselaw was just plain wrong. If the cases weren't well argued, this is even more likely.
>...there is no real underlying "case or controversy." >I'd hate to see how worked up slahdotters would be if there actually >WAS a controversy!;-)
>You feel that it's not an assignment, whereas many of us feel it >could be successfully argued as being the functional equivalent, and >therefore legally equivalent.
I'm not trying to be rude or condescending, but no, damnit!
We're talking about words with specific legal meanings. What you feel, or what I feel, has nothing to do with the matter. If someone feels that writs from the Grand Poohbah transfer property rights because he laberls them "Deed," this doesn't make it legally arguable (at least not in good faith).
>Nothing has any significance in court until a judge says so.
Uh, no. What a judge can and can't "say" is very well defined by eight hundred years of precedent and assorted statutes. The most important facet of the rule of law isn't *which* rule it uses, but that the rule be predicatble. In this case the rule is preddictable, and the idea that the GPL is an assignment is just plain peculiar. [However, there is still the copyright issue, which would invalidate both the GPL and "do what you want" licenses"]
And one more time, even if the GPL were an assignment, this wouldn't let Mattel off the hook--they knew about the release. If they misinterpreted it . . . well, recall _Unforgiven_ , and the response to "You just shot an unarmed man." ? "He should have armed himself." Same thing here. If Mattel misinterpreted it, they should have armed themselves with better counsel.
1) It's not that it's a monopoly, it's that the rest of the world won't take what happens with a couple of amateurs as any prediction as to what the results would be with professionals.
2&3) Yes, two individuals in a conspiracy to defraud the court. This couldn't be heard in any Federal court, as there is no real underlying "case or controversy." SOme state courts have the power to grant advisiory opeinions, though.
No, it wouldn't be a tenth the cost. Apple and Be were far apart (about 3:1, iirc) on price. Be was demanding about what Apple actually paid for Next. Plus Job came as part of the deal:)
1) without lawyers, the outcome would hardly be persuasive 2) its not possible for someone to violate their own license (which is why LyX and some other projects (original KDE code?) are quasi-GPL, not violations of the GPL. No violation means no damages 3) The damages would come from the couple of people trying to test it, why would they agree to give it away. 4) the suit would be a sham from the beginning, not being an actual controversy, making the pleadings perjury, etc . ..
However, given that it is still a nonexclusive license, it isn't anywhere close to an assignment--as is repeatedly said almost everywhere, the authors remain owners of the code even after subjecting it to the GPL.
Furthermore, mattel cannot claim that they were unaware of the license; it was imposible for any vaguely diligent person to find the code without the license. They have either actual or (at worst) constructive notice of the GPL and "do what you want" licensing, and can hardly come back and claim any type of surprise.
>In other words, Mattel has signed a document acknowledging that the >authors (had) all rights to cphack. >No wonder they settled. They WON! >Since both Mattel and the authors have agreed in writing that the >authors had all rights to cphack, then they were certainly within >their rights to license the programi
THis doesn't follow. Mattel did *not* agree that the authors had any rights; they purchased whatever rights they *might* have.
If mattel is correct on the copyright claim, then the purported licensing of the code, either as GPL or "do what you want" is invalid. It is a basic legal principal that you can transfer no better title to something than you yourself hold.
On the other hand, even if the authors were to agree that it was a violation, this would not be binding upon those who received the license under the purported license (but they would still be laible for damages if it is indeed a copyright violation.).
I didn't call it public domain. I did note that "do whatever you want with this" may well be an additional license.
>Essentially, you've assigned the distribution rights
No. Assignment and licensure are different concepts. I know of no licenses offhand that are assignments. "Assign" has specifict legal meaning which a license does not cover.
> and thus can't transfer ALL the rights back
According to the article, the transfered whatever rights they might have, if any, rather than"all rights."
Replying to sorehands, arker, and Ioldanach at once,
sorehands: "do whatever you want with this" is a pretty broad license--probably all the way to public domain. Someone receiving under this license before the assignment to mattel was publicised could keep doing so. Additinally, the claim of GPL'ing means that someone receiving before the assignment could take under the GPL (or a quasi-GPL license).
Either license is valid, and wouldn't be revoked under the later assignment.
Arker: generally, a licensing is not an assignment of rights--especially since the license was exclusive. While licensing, the authors could continue issue under another license (proprietary, perhaps). They can't do this after they assign their rights, which are what had previously let them license.
Ioldanach:
What matters isn't that it was GPL, but the fact of licensure under any license at all. This turns on ancient legal principals rather than the particulars of the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
>Nonsense. The CofL are, among other things, dependent on Larry
>Lessig's construction of the previous appelate court ruling in US. vs
>Microsoft.
Not hardly. Lessig's brief is adressed in a footnote as *another*
wayt that the conclusion might be reached, which the court *declined*
to take.
>If that construction is flawed, then Judge Jackson's
>finding of a section 1 violation is trashed.
Not at all. And even if it were, the section 2 findings would stand.
>Given that opinion
>contained the juicy quotation concerning "allowing judges and
>incompent attorneys to design software", I would suggest that
>Jackson's CofL are exceedingly brittle.
??? He's not arguing for that at all. He also considers
the prior appellate decsion at length. He doesn't rely on attorneys
and judges, but what other firms did in fact produce and market..
hawk, esq.
I wanted to turn spare 486 boxes into exta heads for our alphas. I recalled having heard of NetBSD four or five years earlier, and went looking.
I stumbled across linux along the way, and thought that that must have been what I was after.
Later I came to realize that what I'd heard about was BSD386, and that I'd apparently combined *that* with nethack, which *was* created on the usenet (like I thought netbsd had worked) from five years further back, along with a bit of what would become GNU which was also flying around (at the ten years back stage when I had usenet access).
Then I stumbled across netbsd when I got my paws on a mac that the department would have disposed of. It was my main
machine for a year or so, and when I went back to linux, I discovered that I much preferred the bsd way than the gnu stuff.
So now it's FreeBSD on my K6 at home, debian on this office box (because it doesn't have the resources to compile for itself), and an older debian on my labptop (it works, so I'm not messing wiht it).
So what is this windows thing, anyway? I know it's something about dos. Is it like the way you made a window on the screen with the Apple II, poking the borders into memory (12-15, was it???).
Or is it more like CCP/M's way of dividing the screen, so that you can flip back and forth between a little screen and a big one? That was useful prior to X, but running multitasking ms-dos programs on an 8086 kind of used a lot of power. Maybe that's why it's only in CCP/M and not ms-dos?
:)
hawk, sure that that next innovation from microsoft is coming any day now . . .
They won't get appealled successfully, if that's what you're asking.
And since these new CofL were pretty much pre-ordained by the FofF, folks haven't been waiting--I think I've seen a figure of over 100 already filed.
However, these conclusions are what they'll use; they're the actual finding that MS is a monopolist.
We wait again for the remedies to issue.
We knew that microsoft had lost as soon as we read the findings of fact,
which were a determination of what happened.. This just draws the only
possible conclusion that could be reached from the facts: illegal
conduct.
The FofF can be appealed, but the grounds are essentiall "no reasonable
person could come to this conclusion from the evidence presented." This
is close to impossible, and can be disregarded. The CofL can be
appealed on the grounds that they're incorrect given the facts, but
there's only one possible conclusion, monopoly. Analogy: he laid
in wait, then tortured and killed the victim. The only possible
conclusion is murder with special circumstances.
Next come the remedies, which can be appealed; MS would merely need
to convince the appellate court that another remedy would be better.
However, the court will usually defer to the trial court's judgment
on such matters unless it's clearly on a limb, as the trial court
heard the evidence and has spent much more time on the matter than
the appellate court possibly can.
In short: very little room on appeal for MS, unless the judge
does something *really* wierd for remedies. Breakup will be
examined closely, but would likely stand. It is highly unlikely
that anything short of breakup would be overturned.
hawk,esq.
OK, that shouldnt' be too much difficulty once you've done the counting for the guarantee . . .
but it occurred to me later that to get what I wanted, the cap would have to limit kernel swapping for the process, too . . .
There's something too that. We can't even teach lots of people.
After being at a school with several thousand foreign students, I'm inclined to believe that some of them can *never* be taught to drive.
It's not that they're foreign; it's that they've rarely been in a car before arriving in the U.S. Here (and in other developed countries) we've been in cars from birth, and flowing through traffic. That very flow is missing from these folks; it's entirely an artificial environment. There's some amount of instinct we pick up along the way. Maybe it's like language; far more easily and naturally learned while young.
As a group, those learning to drive here aren't merely worse than more experienced drivers. As a group, they seem to be worse than new drivers (as a group).
If we can't teach this to people, it's going to be really hard to teach it to a machine.
hawk, pondering
have to be the red screen of death . . .
What I'd really like is to be able to *cap* the amount of IO that a process and its descendants can use. On old laptops, I'd like to cap cron and the sluggish updating that happens. On my desktop, I'd like to limit dpkg to 20% or 30% of disk (and core memory, as well) as it takes over on this old machine.
:)
OK, I'll settle for a new machine.
I also saw a shorter version which wasn't nearly as amusing. Here
it is:
If you receive an e-mail with a subject line of "Badtimes," delete it
immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous E-mail
virus yet.
It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any
disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your
refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and your
milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards,
reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR
and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.
It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix
antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave
its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over.
It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with
your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic.
Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will
give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo
with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current
boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to
your Visa card.
It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is
the power of Badtimes. It reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things
we hold most dear.
Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat
up and leave the hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub.
It will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows,
it will refill your skim milk with whole. It is insidious and subtle. It is
dangerous and terrifying to behold.
It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.
These are just a few signs.
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
Lots of us thought about it for a moment, realized it was possible, saw how to do it, and then, the problem solved, lost all interest . . .
Kind of like the "Perfect Crime"--the attributes that would let one plan it correctly are the same ones that stop people from doing it . . .
>It was more like a social virus or a thought virus.
Yuk. Social viruses. THe ones that drop into your office and
drop for hours. Then they leave to infect another office, and your
day is so shot by this point that you go bother someone for
a couple of hours . . .
Yeah, the same folks who think a p120/16mb is a reasonable machine for faculty and doesn't even ened a memory upgrade because "that's enough for windows 95."
.
Anyway, one of them sent one of the Good Times style ones to the department. I wrote her back with the reminder that the message *is* the virus. She insisted that this one, which clamed netscape (?) had verified it and wanted you to send it to everyone was real . .
I gave up.
>But the file format is still version 8 - microsoft failed to break
>compatibility to force users to go buy another upgrade.
wow. That's twice in fifteen years! (word 4 & 5 could share files, too.)
hawk
It's hard to pin down an exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. Most of the newsgroups have become vast wastelands of spam and trolls.
A small handful of groups survived, primarily by aggressively complaining over each and every abusive posting.
Unfortunately, some ISP's (such as Demon) do not see advertising ebay auctions as actionable abuse, and it may become necessary for the surviving groups to go to a script-based moderation--allow known users to post, and hold other posts until viewed.
hawk
>I'm intruiged... are potentially confusing US laws not 'pinned down'
;-)
:)
>by case law as they are in the UK? Shouldn't a Judge be able to
>declare 'the law means this' regardless of the legal abilities of
>either party?
NOt necessarily (and the problem's the same in the UK, too). The
notion of "stare decisis" (already decided) used to be a lot stronger--
once the highest court had ruled, the legal question could never be
revisited, as the law was being "discovered" rather than created. After
a few hundred years, the law had become far too rigid from this, and
the courts of equity were created to get around the problem.
Our systems are adversarial by nature. The idea is that if both sides
to an issue argue to the best of their ability, the truth will come out.
But what if the best argument--the one that would have carried the day--
is never made? The case is wrongly decided under this circumstance.
Today, US courts (and I think UK courts) can decide that older caselaw
was just plain wrong. If the cases weren't well argued, this is
even more likely.
>...there is no real underlying "case or controversy."
>I'd hate to see how worked up slahdotters would be if there actually
>WAS a controversy!
Now you're *really* scaring me . . .
still a lawyer, still not legal advice . . .
>You feel that it's not an assignment, whereas many of us feel it
>could be successfully argued as being the functional equivalent, and
>therefore legally equivalent.
I'm not trying to be rude or condescending, but no, damnit!
We're talking about words with specific legal meanings. What you
feel, or what I feel, has nothing to do with the matter. If someone
feels that writs from the Grand Poohbah transfer property rights
because he laberls them "Deed," this doesn't make it legally
arguable (at least not in good faith).
>Nothing has any significance in court until a judge says so.
Uh, no. What a judge can and can't "say" is very well defined by
eight hundred years of precedent and assorted statutes. The most
important facet of the rule of law isn't *which* rule it uses,
but that the rule be predicatble. In this case the rule is
preddictable, and the idea that the GPL is an assignment is just
plain peculiar. [However, there is still the copyright issue, which
would invalidate both the GPL and "do what you want" licenses"]
And one more time, even if the GPL were an assignment, this wouldn't
let Mattel off the hook--they knew about the release. If they
misinterpreted it . . . well, recall _Unforgiven_ , and the response
to "You just shot an unarmed man." ? "He should have armed himself."
Same thing here. If Mattel misinterpreted it, they should have armed
themselves with better counsel.
hawk, esq.
1) It's not that it's a monopoly, it's that the rest of the world won't take what happens with a couple of amateurs as any prediction as to what the results would be with professionals.
2&3) Yes, two individuals in a conspiracy to defraud the court. This couldn't be heard in any Federal court, as there is no real underlying "case or controversy." SOme state courts have the power to grant advisiory opeinions, though.
No, it wouldn't be a tenth the cost. Apple and Be were far apart (about 3:1, iirc) on price. Be was demanding about what Apple actually paid for Next. Plus Job came as part of the deal :)
Lessseee, where to start?
.
1) without lawyers, the outcome would hardly be persuasive
2) its not possible for someone to violate their own license (which is why
LyX and some other projects (original KDE code?) are quasi-GPL, not
violations of the GPL. No violation means no damages
3) The damages would come from the couple of people trying to test it, why
would they agree to give it away.
4) the suit would be a sham from the beginning, not being an actual controversy,
making the pleadings perjury, etc . .
hawk, esq., still not giving legal advice.
THe GPL is hardly unique in being irrevocable.
However, given that it is still a nonexclusive license, it isn't anywhere close to an assignment--as is repeatedly said almost everywhere, the authors remain owners of the code even after subjecting it to the GPL.
Furthermore, mattel cannot claim that they were unaware of the license; it was imposible for any vaguely diligent person to find the code without the license. They have either actual or (at worst) constructive notice of the GPL and "do what you want" licensing, and can hardly come back and claim any type of surprise.
[still not legal advice]
>In other words, Mattel has signed a document acknowledging that the
>authors (had) all rights to cphack.
>No wonder they settled. They WON!
>Since both Mattel and the authors have agreed in writing that the
>authors had all rights to cphack, then they were certainly within
>their rights to license the programi
THis doesn't follow. Mattel did *not* agree that the authors had any
rights; they purchased whatever rights they *might* have.
hawk, esq.
[this still isn't legal advice :) ]
If mattel is correct on the copyright claim, then the purported licensing of the code, either as GPL or "do what you want" is invalid. It is a basic legal principal that you can transfer no better title to something than you yourself hold.
On the other hand, even if the authors were to agree that it was a violation, this would not be binding upon those who received the license under the purported license (but they would still be laible for damages if it is indeed a copyright violation.).
hawk, esq.
> repeat this 10 times and you might understand:
:)
:)
And I was worried I'd repeated too many times in the original posting
>This is NOT the same as public domain
I didn't call it public domain. I did note that "do whatever you want with this" may well be an additional license.
>Essentially, you've assigned the distribution rights
No. Assignment and licensure are different concepts. I know of no licenses offhand that are assignments. "Assign" has specifict legal meaning which a license does not cover.
> and thus can't transfer ALL the rights back
According to the article, the transfered whatever rights they might have, if any, rather than"all rights."
Replying to sorehands, arker, and Ioldanach at once,
sorehands:
"do whatever you want with this" is a pretty broad license--probably all the way to public domain. Someone receiving under this license before the assignment to mattel was publicised could keep doing so.
Additinally, the claim of GPL'ing means that someone receiving before the assignment could take under the GPL (or a quasi-GPL license).
Either license is valid, and wouldn't be revoked under the later assignment.
Arker:
generally, a licensing is not an assignment of rights--especially since the license was exclusive. While licensing, the authors could continue issue under another license (proprietary, perhaps). They can't do this after they assign their rights, which are what had previously let them license.
Ioldanach:
What matters isn't that it was GPL, but the fact of licensure under any license at all. This turns on ancient legal principals rather than the particulars of the GPL.
hawk, esq.