On 3/17/2023 7:08 PM, Bill Rees wrote:
Does the BSD license,and maybe others too, allow re-licensing?
Certainly one way to solve this if true is to simply change the
license.
I think that the answer is YES, but NO. Let's talk about the YES
first. People do apply a new license to BSD code all of the time.
Apparently that is legal provided that you retain the BSD license --
even if it is very bad etiquette. NuttX used to be BSD licensed and
Samsung did just that to all of the Nuttx code: They slapped their
license at the top of the file and claimed that they hold the copyright.
Check this out as an example:
https://github.com/Samsung/TizenRT/blob/master/os/kernel/semaphore/sem_wait.c
. They did that to 100s of files.
The NO: The ASF forbids that king of replacement of the legitimate
copyright holders claim of ownership and replacement of the copyright
holder's license for reuse. We wanted to do this kind of thing when we
became an Apache project so we know the ASF's position. The bottom line
is: Other people do that, be we cannot.
