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> If the original was permissive, that leaves many options

...especially the option of making everything proprietary.




No. Say you release your project "Foo" as open source (permissive) on project-foo.com. I cannot come and ask you to remove the sources from project-foo.com, and go to everybody who downloaded the code and ask them to delete it.

The version of Foo that you released as open source will always be open source. Now I can make a copy of Foo, use it in my proprietary software Bar, and ship Bar to customers without sharing the sources of Foo (but I need to share the license; all permissive licenses that I know require attribution). Foo is still open source on project-foo.com, I just don't distribute it with Bar.

I can modify Foo, and ship it to customers as a proprietary library (with attribution). My changes to Foo will be proprietary, but project-foo.com will still exist and will still be open source.

Now you own the copyright of Foo, so you can decide to start shipping it (and all new versions) as proprietary. But you can't ask me to delete the fork I made from your open source version, foo-fork.com. So that one will still be open source.




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