[rgbrenner]

I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT

You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that.

If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses.

If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new license takes effect.

[bhuga]

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

[rgbrenner]

sublicense != relicense. You can't remove restrictions. All of the terms of the license would remain. That organization would still need to pay the fee.

[wool_gather]

If it was possible to re-license something in a way that removed restrictions from the original license, then no license would be worth anything. You could do a relicense end-run around any terms you wished.

(As another commenter said,) sublicensing does not permit you to grant any rights under the new license that you yourself have not been granted under the original.

[X86BSD]

I think actually you can. If you rewrite 75%? 80%? You can relicense it. Legally I think the law views that as new code not a modification. A lawyer may need to correct me but I seem to recall something like this.

[majewsky]

Most certainly not. I recall that, in the SCO vs. IBM case, they discussed copyright of individual code snippets, on the range of a dozen lines of code, that were part of a bigger codebase.