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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

On that note, looks like the license use to be Apache 2. From commit 5b85311a in the repo (which is forked from another project):

>commit 5b85311ab09ed4d8d3dacb235de77f7de8253b1b

> Author: Yohei Yukawa <yukawa@google.com>

> Date: Mon Nov 19 12:11:31 2018 -0800

> Move MODULE_LICENSE_APACHE2 to the project top dir

> In general files in LatinIME project should be Apache 2 license (unless some exceptional note is there). This is not limited to Java source files.

At first glance, this looks like someone took a FOSS project and illegally changed its license. Am I reading that wrong?

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Apache 2 is a permissive (think "pushover") license that allows proprietary forks. If the original were GPL or another copyleft license, then this would indeed have been illegal.

Can you? The relevant bit from the license seems to be:

> You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.

I'm not clear how to interpret that "as a whole" bit combined with "otherwise complies".

Essentially the most that is really required by permissive licenses (Apache, BSD, MIT and their ilk) is a preservation of the license text, if even that. Anything else beyond that is open to change. So anyone can take any project licensed as such, and relicense with something more or less business-friendly, regardless of whether all contributors agree or not. That's what it means to be permissive.

That's not my understanding at all. You can't just relicense BSD code. You can incorporate it and distribute it with your own code that's under another license, but you couldn't just clone the FreeBSD source tree, 'sed s/BSD/My Own License', and call it good.

Relicense as in add another license with whatever restrictions they desire, because literally anything aside from changing/removing the original license itself goes.

As long as you keep the previous license text somewhere and note what it applies to then I don't see the problem? FUTO does both in the NOTICE file:

> Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");

> you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

> ...

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