Open Source Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people organizing, marketing or licensing open source development projects. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My co-founder recently left my startup, and it has ended on bad terms. We have a piece of software on GitHub under Apache 2.0 licence, and I have revoked his access to the repository.
Can I continue building and using this piece of software commercially? Do I need his permission? Can I just fork it and continue safely?
IANAL/IANYL. That said, you two have made this code available to the world under Apache 2, and it is generally held that licence grants are irrevocable once they have been relied on.
I would not do anything further under the existing repo. I would fork that repo as soon as possible - the forking being a clear point at which you're relying on your co-contributor's licence grant - and continue work on the forked project. You don't need to change the name, but it would be helpful to avoid confusion for end-users if you were to do so.
Your co-contributor might well insist on having his/her code removed from the original repository, and indeed it might be simpler to delete it. But it seems to me that (s)he can't insist on his/her code being removed from the fork (though you should be punctilious about preserving his/her copyright notices, as good manners, intellectual honesty, and the Apache licence require).
Your co-founder succeeds in releaving you of your copyright. Now you are not the copyright holder. You are just a licensee of the software. You can still fork the code, and continue to contribute. After a while you will be a dominant copyright holder.
In any case. If your co-founder also forks, there will be two projects.
