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by mtlynch 822 days ago
How do they get away with relicensing GPL code?

My understanding is that you can relicense code for which you own the copywright, but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL. So, you'd have to either get their permission to relicense or revert all their changes and subsequent derivatives.
4 comments
dspillett 822 days ago
1. Some projects only really had one maintainer, or a small group, so relicensing is a relatively easy discussion.

2. Some projects have a CLA, so all contributions have the relevant rights transferred before the patches are accepted.

3. Some projects are “open source, not open contribution”, though this wasn't common until recently, effectively making them match point 1.

4. Some relicensing is done without consideration for other contributors, in the hope that no one with skin in the game will notice (or take action if they do), so it won't bite.

5. Sometimes getting the relevant permission after-the-fact, if a CLA was not in place, isn't difficult.

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taw28 822 days ago
Contributor agreements are often used at the time of contribution to get permission to relicence later.
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simne 821 days ago
> but if you have any other contributors, those contributions are still under GPL.

You hit the bull eye.

These all projects as I could see, have relatively low number of important contributors and narrow circuit, and they are mostly relatively young projects, without large number of inherited old code, so when need to throw out some code, they just need to make internal deal and rewrite all "external" code.

Once, they have all code owned by limited group, could make deal within this group, to re-license whole project with other license.

And yes, you are right, this is near impossible for big projects, because need too much resources to rewrite "external" code.

And in many cases, for big business this mean, for them is easier to just make their own new project from scratch, than to use GPL-licensed code.

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makeworld 822 days ago
Often these projects had a CLA from the beginning, so they own all the code by other contributors.
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