I have many questions and do not really know where to start

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

Ben Tilly wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Matthew Flaschen
> <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
>>John Cowan wrote:
>>
>>>Yes, although it may be problematic to retract the rights of people who
>>>are already acting on the license.
>>
>>Also note that changing the license will be difficult if you have
>>incorporated modifications from other copyright holders.
> 
> 
> That is not true if you're moving from a permissive license (like the
> MIT) to the GPL.  It is true if you're moving from the GPL to a
> permissive license.

Be aware that there are legal issues and social issues.

Taking a multi-author codebase from MIT-like permissive license to a more 
restrictive license like GPL seems like there is little legal risk.

But in an open source project, the license is the basis of the agreement the 
contributors make to cooperate.  Unilaterally changing the basis of cooperation 
is a very big risk.  (Think...forks, bad publicity, disgruntled contributors, etc.)


> 
> Cheers,
> Ben
>