4 ms·
How are they able to change the license of code that people committed under the 3-clause BSD license without the permission of those people?
by ccmcarey 6y ago
How are they able to change the license of code that people committed under the 3-clause BSD license without the permission of those people?
- 1337_d00dZ 6y agoIt's open source code; you use it like any other open source code, ship the license with the software.
- structural 6y agoRead the BSD license. There's nothing preventing the code being redistributed in another product (in this case, Mapbox JS v2) under any license terms whatsoever, as long as the copyright holders are appropriately credited.
- bdon 6y agoI don't see an issue with this - It's well understood that this can happen with permissive licenses, although often it's from BSD -> GPL/copyleft license.
- chrisseaton 6y agoThey aren’t changing the licence of the existing code.
- josephcsible 6y agoBecause the BSD license is a permissive/pushover license, which let you relicense other people's work as proprietary. The reason that copyleft licenses like the GPL are better is exactly that they don't allow this sort of behavior.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago99% of the code in Mapbox GL was written by Mapbox employees on company time. The GPL would have made no difference.
- stevage 6y agoExcept in practice, removing that 1% (or getting permission from its contributors) could be extremely complicated.