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Please stop spreading incorrect information. Re-licensing is an exclusive right granted to the copyright holder; it has a specific meaning under copyright law.
by athms 6y ago
Please stop spreading incorrect information. Re-licensing is an exclusive right granted to the copyright holder; it has a specific meaning under copyright law. There is nothing in the Apache, BSD, or MIT license that grants re-licensing. Using source code that has been licensed under a permissive license in a larger work that is licensed differently (including more restrictions) isn't re-licensing.
- geofft 6y agoAbsolutely true. There's a consequence of this that people tend to ignore: You cannot remove the (e.g.) MIT license text from an MIT-licensed work if you redistribute it as GPL. The MIT license gives you "Permission ... subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." You can abide by that condition by distributing your software under the GPL and retaining the MIT license text for portions. You cannot abide by that condition by "relicensing" the software and removing the MIT license: you are in violation of the license.
- pessimizer 6y agoFair distinction in MIT's case, and other attribution-ware.
- pessimizer 6y ago> Using source code that has been licensed under a permissive license in a larger work that is licensed differently (including more restrictions) isn't re-licensing. Whatever you want to call it is fine. I prefer to think that GPL'd software that incorporates Open Source takes a copy and makes it GPL (especially because if I modify the Open Source at all, my changes are not available under an Open Source license.) Other people who are using that piece of Open Source are not using my copy, which is GPL.