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Comment by mackman | Hacker News Reader

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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