On Friday, March 17, 2023, Gregory Nutt <spudan...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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/sem > aphore/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. > > I agree!!! Follow good examples, not the bad ones!
Then we will be the good examples ourselves! Probably Nordic also released these same files as Apache License, since they contribute to projects under that license! Also having BSD license correctly listed on our project is fine. It will not force as change our final binary license. For GPL that is other history! BR, Alan
