[License-discuss] New maintainer, changing license?

[David Woolley]

On 29/07/17 09:38, Johnny A. Solbu wrote:
> I am the new upstream maintainer of the cd ripper Grip

What do you mean by the maintainer?  If you are the actual copyright 
owner, you can distribute it under any licence you like, as long as you 
continue to honour requests to supply the source code for versions you 
previously distributed.

To the extent that you do not own the copyright in any particular file, 
you can redistribute that file under the relevant version 3 licence.

If you have accepted non-trivial changes without copyright being 
assigned to you, or the right to re-licence, you do not fully own the 
copyright in the affected files and cannot make an arbitrary change of 
licence, but can still upgrade to version 3.


> The code licence is stated as follows:
>
> ==
>  * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
>  * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
>  * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
>  * License, or (at your option) any later version.
> ==
> Some files are licenced under the Lesser GPL, with the same type of terms saying that one can use a later version.
>
> My question is: Does this mean that I can change it to say it's released under GPL version 3 and later?
>