Can you alter the MIT license?

[Scott Johnston]

>Wrong. The MIT (X) license does not give you the right to change the license.

I'm not sure this is true.  It says at least one copy of the permission
notice must be included in the documentation, but it not clear whether the
terms of the permission notice have to remain in force.  There are strong
advocates for either interpretation, and nothing concrete will be known
until it is tested in court.  But I've been trying to figure out what people
think before it gets that far, by studying their actions.

- The Free Software Foundation skirted the issue with its repackaging of the
X rendering capability into libxmi.  They licensed the new library under
GPL, but the original source files borrowed from X remain under MIT terms
(even though those files have most likely been modified to embed them in a
GPL library).

- Some will say the Open Group proved you can change the license when they
(temporarily) modified the terms for X11R6.4.  But they are a special case,
in that they are the copyright holder for X, and the one party with that
freedom.

- Apple's relicensing of BSD-licensed software under their own open source
license might be the most fruitful case to investigate.  No one disagrees
that the sources they started with could still be available under the
original terms.  But does Apple grant what the FSF granted with libxmi, i.e.
the right to use original yet modified source files under the original
terms?

Scott Johnston
Vectaport Inc.
http://www.vectaport.com