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, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.” This guarantee makes explicit a promise of permanence that has always been implicit in the peer-production model: it “assur[es]. . . developers that their work could never be taken away from them,” but will remain in the commons in perpetuity. It is precisely this assurance that the Copyright Act’s termination provisions may place in doubt.

A GPL variant used for some FOSS works, the GNU Lesser General Public License (“LGPL”), incorporates most of the provisions of the GPL. The key difference is that the LGPL relaxes the GPL’s copyleft condition as applied to application programs dynamically linked to LGPL-licensed library code. This waiver from the GPL’s strict copyleft condition is believed to encourage the commercial use of LGPL-licensed content.