I came across bootstrapvalidator project on Github which was released under MIT license in the past. In the contributors list, I can see a lot many people other than the main author of the project. The latest releases of the project are under a commercial license.
- Is it legal for the author to change the license from MIT license to a commercial one, if he is the only contributor?
- Is it legal to change the license from MIT license to a commercial one, if there are other contributors involved?
Best Answer
The MIT license is considered a fairly permissive license for a number of reasons, including the sublicense clause:
Emphasis mine
It's this portion of the MIT license that allows anyone to take an MIT license and re-license so long as they maintain the requirements stated with
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Yes, as the sole author of the project, they own the copyright to the project. Owning the copyright allows them to re-license the project to a commercial license.
In this particular case, the copyright owner to the project can re-license as they wish and does not need to maintain the copyright or permission notices from the MIT license.
The project could be re-licensed in any of the following cases:
In the first two cases, the copyright owner(s) can re-license without maintaining the copyright and permission notices.
In the third case, the person re-licensing the project must obey the terms of the license and they must maintain the copyright and permission notices.
Also note that the MIT license is not a copyleft license, so there is no obligation to share the associated source code.
Likewise, just because someone chooses to fork and re-license a project, that re-licensing applies only to the forked project. The re-licensing has no bearing upon the original project or how the original project is licensed.