[License-discuss] OSI approved license without original license and reproduction of notices required in redistributions?

[Johnny Solbu]

On Monday 02 July 2012 17:40, Casey Rodarmor wrote:
> It seems that if I am the original copyright holder and I specifically allow for it in the license,
> alteration of the copyright notices 

Unless you explicitly transfer the copyright to someone else, You are the copyrights holder. Don't confuse copyrights with licensing.
And in some juristdicions, transfer of copyrights are expresly prohibited. (There's a difference in transfering coprights and transfering parts of your rights granted by copyrighs.)

In my country, Norway, we are not allowed to place anything in the public domain. To circumvent that, we use licenses to achieve the same effect.
We are also not allowed to transfer what our legal system calls moral rights. Which means that in Norway, giving credit to the author is legally required. Even for works that lose copyright protection some 70+ years after the authors death. (As an example, we are legaly required to give credit to King James as the author when we redistribute the old 1611 KJV Bible.)

In short, there are a few limits to what an author and a copyright holder are allowed to give permission to do.

> and trivial relicensing should be 
> no problem.

To allow relicensing, use a license that does not have a clause to release derivative works under the same or equivalent license. This also means that Microsoft and Apple can take it, replace your license with their EULA, and prohibit the redistribution of their version.

-- 
Johnny A. Solbu
web site,   http://www.solbu.net
PGP key ID: 0xFA687324
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