Free license

Changing license

When you write any software, you are defacto the copyright owner of that software.

When people contribute code, they have copyright over their code.

You can choose to license your code in any way. Even when you host on github, you can give away no license thus making it illegal for anyone to be using your software.

If you choose to give out your code with a free license, people will be able to download, use, share, remix, adapt, etc.

Now, when you have released a software with free license, is it possible to change the license? There are different points to understand.

In GPL under section 2, basic permissions: [quote]“All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.”[/quote] Therefore, once you release a software with a free license, people can always use that version (the version with the free license) if they comply with the license terms.

But, you, the copyright holder, can always choose to release a new version with a different license. If the code you add in the new version is not freely licensed, people cannot use that version.

And, when you change the license, you’ve to be careful that you’ve complete authority to do so. If you are not the sole author of the code you do not have the sole authority to change the license either. You’ve to make sure all the authors who contributed code are willing to have their copyrighted code be licensed under a different license. If they aren’t willing, you’ll have to exclude their code from your codebase before changing the license.