4 ms·

License changes are not unheard of. Wine changed from the MIT license to LGPL without all of the developer's support.

• lukeschlather 10y ago
  That's fine within the terms of the MIT license. It's not okay to relicense LGPL to MIT without author consent.
  • the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    You can't do that but you can do further contributions under the LGPL which essentially makes it an LGPL project.
    • jsmthrowaway 10y ago
      What provision of the MIT license prevents it? My understanding is that MIT -> GPL is legal as long as the required notice is kept for MIT compliance, since MIT is a subset of GPL.
      • protomyth 10y ago
        What provision of the MIT License allows it? By default it is prevented in a copyrighted work. I don't think the sublicense clause covers it.
        • cyphar 10y ago
          MIT is not copyleft. If you can sublicense MIT to be proprietary (which is what most people consider to be a "benefit" of the MIT license) then you can also sublicense it to be under the GPL[1]. The GPL does not strictly provide more rights than the MIT license. [1]: http://danashultz.com/blog/2010/10/19/what-is-a-sublicense-agreement/ http://danashultz.com/blog/2010/10/19/what-is-a-sublicense-a...
          • protomyth 10y ago
            We don't change the license on the original code when we include it in proprietary software. I cannot just take a piece of MIT licensed code and change the license to what I want. I can add code of a different license.
            • johncolanduoni 10y ago
              You can't make the original code not-MIT-licensed, since the author already released it as such (and even they cannot make it not-MIT-licensed). But you can release it (with or without modifications) under another license as long as it lets you follow the MIT license's only restriction (reproduction of the copyright notice). What do you think being GPL-compatible (for example) means other than that? The GPL requires you to release all parts of the derived work under the GPL, not just a compatible license.
              • protomyth 10y ago
                > You can't make the original code not-MIT-licensed Yes, that's what I was saying.
                • ricardobeat 10y ago
                  Actually you are saying different things. Even thought the original code will still be forever available under MIT, you can, for example, sell it under a proprietary license (without changing a line of code) to whoever is willing to pay for that.
            • cyphar 10y ago
              Yes you do (well change is the wrong word, you're sublicensing your copy of the code). Otherwise the software would not be proprietary. Windows for example used to ship BSD licensed code, and it would have been a violation of Windows' license to modify that code (even though the original code was under a free software license). I don't understand which part of this is confusing you -- the MIT license explicitly states that sublicensing is permitted. If you didn't sublicense the code, then users would be allowed to have all the freedoms that come with the MIT license. This would make it impossible to have a proprietary version of an MIT licensed project -- which is something that we objectively know is possible because it happens all the time.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    It's never fine to relicense works of others, unless you have a CLA giving you that explicit right.
    • johncolanduoni 10y ago
      Or a license that gives you that explicit right (like the MIT license does).