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I'm a little unsure how the open source licensing stuff works. If I were to choose a particular open source license, what do you actually have to do to make it applicable to your software? I would imagine it would be a little more involved than just 'stating' that you're releasing your software under LGPL. And how does this 'contract' bind legally to your software?
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Yes, it is possible to make an open source project into a closed source project. The copyright holder can change the license of a project at any time, or cease to distribute source code of new releases. New releases can therefore be made closed source.
Open source often referred as free of cost software. It can, however, have costs for extras like assistance, additional services or added functionality. Thus, you may still pay for a service with OSS. Closed source software is usually a paid software.
You can add or change to whatever license you or your company wants to. Otherwise there may be other copyright holders that you need agreement from in order to change licenses.
With closed source software (also known as proprietary software), the public is not given access to the source code, so they can't see or modify it in any way. But with open source software, the source code is publicly available to anyone who wants it, and programmers can read or change that code if they desire.
It's as simple as deciding to license your software under a particular license. This is not technically contract law, but copyright law. As the owner/licenser of your intellectual property (the source and binaries) you may license its distribution anyway you see fit. Providing a clear disclaimer as to the recipients rights under the license is all that is necessary. Without a license, whether closed or open, no one has a right to distribute your copyrighted work. The purpose of all licenses is to grant some of your rights to other parties.
See here for more information. Or for perhaps too much information, check out O'Reilly's Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing.
~ William Riley-Land
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