[rectang]

Is the maintainer is the only copyright holder? If not, and other authors have contributed under the AGPL, the maintainer can't switch the license.

EDIT: I found this in the linked blog post:

> I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL.

[josephcsible]

This is why you shouldn't do any substantial free work for projects that want a CLA.

[rubyist5eva]

MIT code doesn’t even need to be relicensed, technically. So it can be left in as-is.

[suprjami]

Thanks, this was my first thought too.

[stefantalpalaru]

> I can change the license (or sublicense) because I wrote almost all the code myself, and all remaining patches to mold are licensed under the dual license of MIT/AGPL.

He's wrong about that. That MIT license is not an attribution of copyright, which is what he needs to relicense external contributions.

This is why corporate-run projects make you sign a CLA where you renounce copyright. This is why GPL licenses have an "any later version" formula, to allow project owners to move to a newer version of the GPL license later on.

[comex]

He can relicense everything except the code from those patches, while keeping that code under the MIT license. He will be required to preserve the MIT copyright notice and license text, and if he wanted to initiate a copyright lawsuit he would have to exclude those bits from what he's suing over, but otherwise there's no problem. GPL-family licenses have a stronger need for "any later version" than permissive licenses, since the virality rule means you can't just combine code under different GPL licenses in the same program.

(Technically, the MIT license also grants the right to sublicense, so he actually could change the license, but only if the new license incorporated the MIT license's attribution requirement. Probably. The license is vague and I'm not a lawyer.)

[nh2]

More details here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1059...