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My solution is to start of with GPLv3, then I can always relax it later if needed. If your project takes a lot of external contributions, you can always requir

My solution is to start of with GPLv3, then I can always relax it later if needed. If your project takes a lot of external contributions, you can always require that the contributions be licensed under a less restrictive license in case you need to relicense later. The other thing is you can grant exceptions to people if they have an unanticipated need (i.e., mixing your code with other free software code with incompatible licenses).

kakwa_ 8y ago
For that solution to work, you need to be extra cautious about ownership. If you are the sole contributor, no issue there. But if you start receiving contributions from outside (Pull Requests on Github for example), then part of the code is owned by the external contributor. It means that if you want to change the license, either you made the external contributors sign some (digital) papers stating they give away ownership of their contributions, or you chase down each individual contributors and manage to make them agree to the license change, or you remove any code from external contributors. The first is doable but is a bit of of barrier to external contributions, the middle one can work on a small project with few external contributors, but is a bit risky (the external contributor can say no, or more likely be difficult to contact), the later is somewhat impractical. Changing the license of a project is not impossible, but it can be somewhat of a nightmare, specially if there is a lot of external contributors.