This may be a serious challenge to the GPL. Quote from Zed:

"I have written, with my own hand, the good bulk of the source code for xchat, so I can release it under any license terms I wish. When contributors submitted patches to me over time, they did not specify any terms."

Anyone else see a problem with this? Zed's supporters don't. This raises a whole mess of questions. Not least of which is this one:

In order to avoid abuse, do contributors now have be paranoid and explicitly state the exact license their code must be used under even if the code base they are contributing to is widely disseminated under a specific license already (in this case the GPL)? Is that how it is now, assume nothing or be taken advantage of? Wasn't this the whole reason the GPL was created, to avoid situations like this?

Please share your thoughts.

Well,

GPLed products can't be taken away, but the copyright holder can license the product with any other licenses too. (IANAL)

I guess it's not sinking in. Read this quote:

"When contributors submitted patches to me over time, they did not specify any terms."

What do you get out of that? It says Zed does not respect that people assumed their work was going to be under the GPL. Think of the implications of this a bit.

Well, RMS has been debating about the same issue for quite some time. As I understand, the point you revealed is the core of the classical emacs - xemacs issue.