Change project licence?

[Tim Chase]

On 2017-09-23 19:14, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Kryptxy <kryptxy at protonmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Thank you all! I opened a ticket about the same (on github).
> > I got response from most of them, and all are agreeing to the
> > change. However, one contributor did not respond at all. I tried
> > e-mailing, but no response.
> > Can I still proceed changing the licence? It has been more than a
> > week since the ticket was opened.  
> 
> Nope. Contributions made under the GPL have a guarantee that they
> will only and forever be used in open source projects. You're
> trying to weaken that guarantee, so you have to get clear
> permission from everyone involved.
> 
> Unless you can show that the contributions in question are so
> trivial that there's no code that can be pinpointed as that
> person's, or you replace all that person's code, you can't proceed
> to relicense it without permission.

Alternatively, you can rip out that contributor's code and re-code it
from scratch in a clean-room without consulting their code.  Then
their code is under their license while your re-implementation code
is under whatever license you like.

If their contributions were minor, this might be a nice route to go.
If they were a major contributor, you could be looking at a LOT of
work.

But those are your options:

- keep the project as GPL

- get *ALL* contributors to formally agree to the license change,

- confirm that the contributions of recalcitrant contributor(s)
  are limited to trivial changes, or

- recreate all GPL code in a clean-room under your own license


-tkc