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You can't just change the license to a copyleft license, but you can make changes to it that are licensed under a copyleft license. If your fork/derivative proj
by ryukafalz 5y ago
You can't just change the license to a copyleft license, but you can make changes to it that are licensed under a copyleft license. If your fork/derivative project gets enough attention, you've practically changed the license anyway.
If one is contributing to a project with a permissive license, that should also imply being a-ok with it getting rolled into a copyleft project too.
- samatman 5y agoThey're welcome to try, of course. Examples of permissively licensed code being used in proprietary systems abound. Has anyone ever successfully copyleft-jacked such a project? I grant that it's possible but I'm not aware of it actually happening.
- ryukafalz 5y agoLibreOffice comes to mind immediately as the most high-profile one I can think of. That aside, any permissively licensed library used in a GPL program would technically fall under this situation, as it ends up distributed under the terms of the GPL. It just so happens that usually the libraries aren't modified by the application developer, so you can typically go find the original source. If they are, those changes may be under the GPL, depending on whether the application developer kept the derivative version of the library explicitly under its original license, or licensed their changes under the application's license.