A side effect of voluntary removal Linus Torvalds who took permission from Linux to think about how it treats people and the upcoming Linux Code of Conduct (CoC) is also the following question:
What happens if one of the developers is forced to abandon Linux? Will he be able to take his code with him, essentially removing him from the operating system? 
The controversy started when someone with the nickname "unconditionalwitness" - who had never posted on LKML (from Linux Kernel Mailing List Archive), wrote that people who were forced to leave the Linux Kernel community because of the CoC could "request the grant of their ownership through a written notice to those using the code as their own."
If you are concerned, no one has been forced to leave the community until today, and there is no sign that this is going to happen because of the CoC. But there are some people who are worried about what happens if developers are removed from the Linux community.
As soon as the code is granted, the Linux community thinks logically that the developer will not hurt Linux, asking for the right to use the code.
Ο unconditionalwitness, who claims to be a lawyer, does not seem to be a subscriber of the Linux kernel. The e-mail account he uses comes from an anonymous mail server. So basically we're talking about an anonymous who just threw a bomb. Many Linux developers threatened him, but his argument shattered the puddle waters (in terms of ownership of the code) of the community.
Eric S. Raymond, one of the open source creators, wrote his own message to LKML:
"This threat makes sense. I searched for the relevant law when I founded the Open Source initiative, which confirms that reputational damage associated with converting a contributor's rights into a GPL project is legal. ”
Richard M. Stallman, who is the author of the GPLv2 license - the open source license that governs Linux, replied:
“Linux developers or any freeware program can remove any code at any time without giving any reason. However, this does not oblige others to delete their code from their own versions of a program. "
While both have made a significant contribution to the creation of free software, open source and Linux license, they are not lawyers.
At instructions from the GPL by Free Software Foundation (FSF), open source legal advisor and Columbia law professor Eben Moglen says:
In order to ensure that all our intellectual property rights can satisfy registrations and other registration requirements, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL in the most effective way, the FSF requires each author of code participating in the FSF projects to provides copyright disposal and, where appropriate, disclaims any claim of property for paid employment by the developer's employer.
Linux, however, does not require its contributors to sign an assignment of intellectual property rights.
Η Karen Sandler, δικηγόρος και εκτελεστικός διευθυντής του Software Freedom Conservancy, ανέφερε: “Δεν υπάρχει κάποιος αποτελεσματικός τρόπος για να ανακληθεί ο κώδικας που έχει αδειοδοτηθεί, διανεμηθεί και αναδιανεμηθεί με βάση το GPLv2. Το copyleft είναι ισχυρό.”
Heather Meeker partner at O'Melveny & Myers he says:
The legal analysis is a bit complicated, but ultimately a license open code grants rights to any recipient once the author makes the code available under the license. These rights may be enjoyed by any recipient until the recipient violates the license and loses its rights.
The notion that open source licenses are arbitrarily revocable - because the license is free and therefore not so serious, or because the license is not a contract and therefore does not enjoy the benefits of dependency theory or because the author has committed an offense and is in conflict with the code of conduct or any other theory that could be constructed brings out the detail more than the substance. These arguments will not win, mainly because the courts do not like intellectual property owners to bite the apple twice.The idea of revocability went into the 1990 decade as a FUD technique to scare people and get them away from using open source software.
