Can open source code hosted at github be closed-source?

Question

Can the owner of an open source Github repository later decide to close it? What about other people\'s contribution to that project?

Edit - several peop

Answer 1

The copyright owner can choose whatever license he wants for code. However, changing a license is not a retroactive decision, it won't revoke the license of stuff that has already been released. Unhappy users can thus still fork the code and continue the work under the terms of the previous license.

But you should really ask this question to a lawyer (which I'm not). For example I'd tempted to say that released = publicly available but this is just my interpretation. Really, ask a lawyer.