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They they can't. Most (all?) of the opensource licenses do not have the "revokable clause" with them.


Ok. What happens if GNU decides to Fork the GPL v3 and call it "GPLv3+NSA Exception" and then relicense all their code to this new forked license?

A clause in this forked license is that the NSA can't use it.


That's an addition, not an exception. An exception would say "you must the GPL, unless you are/are doing xyz, in which case you can use abc license". You are saying "you can use the GPL, unless you are/are doing xyz, in which case you can't". That clause cannot legally be inserted in the GPL.


You cannot apply license _retroactively_. Once you release code version under a certain License, the License is associated with that version of the code.




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