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Comment by jenny91 | Hacker News Reader

The new license is really silly: it grants a variety of entities (open source projects, non-profits, for-profits with <US$1m revenue) an Apache 2.0 license to the code.

All it takes is for one of those entities to clone the code on Github; slap the Apache 2.0 license on it (that they are rightfully using for the project), and anybody can then reuse it under Apache 2.0 as if nothing ever happened. Or for an entity with more resources, set up a holding company with no revenue and get an Apache 2.0 license and give it out to your parent company.

Whatever your stance is on these relicensing things... do make sure the license makes sense and at least achieves your aims!

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For some reason they also try to prevent the license requirements from 'infecting' open source projects that use ImageSharp as a dependency. Unfortunately this means that anyone is free to make an open source project that doesn't do much more than wrap the project inside a new license. You can then compile that project and use it as is.

I get what they want to do, but I'm not sure if their self-made license holds up legally.

Ubiquity of a permissive license, or all the revenue from clients with deep pockets -- choose one, you can't have both (not considering open core with value-add proprietary offerings here). Should be really obvious.

Use a permissive license if you really mean it, not if you want to growth hack.

It would seem to make more sense (in the context of the apparent desires of developers in this situation) to license things like this with a dual license setup. License the base project as AGPL and have outside contributors sign a copyright license. All open source projects compatible with AGPL can use it as is. The second license would be a freeware/commercial license. Freeware for organizations under 1 million dollars US in revenue. A paid commercial license above that mark. That would seem to satisfy the base requirements that developers want as well as some of the community. Of course, the rest of the community that wishes it to continue under the existing license would be free to fork that last available version as always.

Just because you have a license to use software doesn’t mean you have a license to change the license.

Sure it does! It just depends on the original license. I saw my previous employer pick up MIT licensed projects and slap a new GPL license on a fork and that was the only one they’d contribute to.

That seems like a complicated topic, and it's not 100% clear to me that it would have the effect they wanted if they weren't very careful about how they did it.

See: https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-colla...

There is nothing unclear about it: they took a permissively licensed piece of code (MIT), then relicensed it under a copyleft license (GPL). (Then possibly/presumably made changes to that GPL codebase.)

The MIT license gives you a right to sublicense to your heart's content.

I provided a link from people that would know, and it includes phrases like:

"A more complicated case occurs when a developer makes copyrightable changes to a permissive-licensed file that the developer is incorporating into a GPL’d program"

"Note, however, that in a single source file it is typically very difficult, and often completely infeasible, to determine which parts of such a file are covered by permissive terms."

The point being that perhaps you can relicense it, but does that accomplish what you want...making some particular part of it fully bound by the GPL? That's the complicated part.

Your link is about projects that mix licenses between files.

This is just taking the full project wholesale and relicensing the whole thing under GPL.

They don't need to, by the Apache 2.0 license they're allowed to redistribute the software under the Apache 2.0 license.

This license itself grants the licensee permission to relicense:

  Licenses are granted based upon You meeting the qualified criteria as stated.

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