
Ask HN: What are the rules around changing licenses of forked project? - glamp
Someone forked a project I built that is licensed under BSD-2. The new project is licensed under GPL-2.<p>I don&#x27;t particularly care, but it made me curious about what sort of rules or standards there are about this type of thing.
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detaro
Legally, you of course need to respect the license of source you forked from,
so going from BSD-2 to GPL-2 you need to keep the authorship and license
information from the original intact, because _1\. Redistributions of source
code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer._. You couldn't relicense GPL code to BSD, because GPL
includes restrictions not in BSD. Search keyword is "license compatibility".

Socially, there's the aspect that upstream typically can't make use of
improvements to the fork without the contributors explicitly making it
available under the upstream license too, which can cause additional friction.

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rectang
Just outright replacing the headers is illegal. The original copyright owners
have licensed the content under the specific terms of the BSD-2 license.
Removing the BSD-2 header violates that license. Removing the copyright notice
(which the BSD-2 header contains, unlike some other license headers) also
violates copyright law.

