Re:Theo de Raadt on LLVM license change
by protomyth on Saturday October 01, 2016 @02:41PM
(#12619267)
You cannot change the license on someone else's copyrighted work.
> Windows for example used to ship BSD licensed code, and it would have been a violation of Windows' license to modify that code (even though the original code was under a free software license).
Microsoft didn't include source and if I had obtained the BSD licensed source, I could certainly modify it and distribute it (but not the code written by Microsoft). Also, the BSD doesn't have a sublicense clause which is problematic for your first sentence.
> You cannot change the license on someone else's copyrighted work.
The grandparent already said that "changing" is not the thing being discussed here, but "sublicensing", so this is a strawman.
I don't understand which part of this is confusing you -- the MIT license explicitly states that sublicensing is permitted. If you didn't sublicense the code, then users would be allowed to have all the freedoms that come with the MIT license. This would make it impossible to have a proprietary version of an MIT licensed project -- which is something that we objectively know is possible because it happens all the time.