[clarry]

Relicensing is a weird term and easily leads to confusion. I guess you can write your own terms and distribute copies under these new terms. But you cannot revoke the rights the original license has granted to people who have received the work under that license. Nor can you revoke the original author's exclusive rights. The license text (which is about the copying and performing of the covered work) does not grant you such powers.

[belorn]

A license is a permission granted by the author, and an extension of the authors wishes.

This is why relicensing as a term indeed leads to confusion. People think the license is inherently a part of the work, and thus can be as readily changed as the software source itself. It is however not part of the work, but part of the author. If you want to change the license, you need to get the author to change his mind.

Some licenses allow people to add new licenses on-top of existing licenses. That is not re-licensing, but simply the addition of more requirements. If you remove the original license, you loose the permission needed to use/copy the work created by the original author.

[clarry]

Thanks for expressing it so clearly. I'll quote you when the time comes.

The SFLC had a chance to set this straight in the aftermath of the inflammatory 2007 episode around the Atheros driver. Instead they dodged the entire relicensing question and released a set of guidelines which focus on where and how to preserve the copyright notice, and that rather seems to only have reinforced the idea that the permissive BSD style licenses are nothing more than a decorative text you must lug around. So we still have a huge number of people who think they can do anything (e.g. "relicense") as long as the decoration is kept in place. It really is a shame.