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Did you pick the wrong license?

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stormy's picture
Posted September 5th, 2008 by Stormy Peters

Some times projects fail because they picked the wrong license. The good news for those projects is that you can always change your license. (Although depending on how many outside contributions you have and whether or not you got a copyright assignment from them, this may be very simple or very time consuming.)

There's been two recent examples of relicensing in the GNOME projects. 

  1. Evolution is being relicensed from GPL to LGPL to enable users to use Evolution with the Exchange 2007 sever. 
  2. The Tango icon theme was relicensed from a creative commons license to a public domain type license. The Tango icon theme was originally created to be an example but it turned out that many people just wanted to use it. The creative commons license didn't allow them to embed Tango in their GPL licensed products but the public domain type license will. By relicensing under a public domain type license, Tango will get many more users, and enable many more projects to use the freedesktop.org naming specification.
Not only is picking the right license important, but it's also important to reevaluate your license choice every once in a while to make sure it's still the right one for the current environment.
grouss's picture

Wrong license or right time for each license ?

Submitted by Guillaume Rousseau on Wed, 2008-09-10 20:06.
I would like to underline at least one other example where license change occurs not because it was the wrong choice, but because initial license is no longer appropriate. It happens in projet libresource (an open source javabase forge), which was intially launched under QPL, and has been released under GPL this summer. Maturity of the project, and some commercial considerations were the key elements of the decision, without considering initial choice was wrong. More over use of the QPL and its IPR centralized scheme (at least for contributions under QPL) made relicensing very easy. Of course QT is another well knonwn example