Comment by evanelias
1 year ago
I'm well-versed in the terms of Apache 2.0. You are misinterpreting them. The key clause here is that last one: provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.
The entire parts of the code base you didn't modify are still copyrighted by their original authors, and are still subject to the Apache 2.0 license. This is why big tech companies make third-party open source contributors agree to CLAs; without that, they would be unable to relicense the work in the future (among other reasons).
In general, even with a permissive license, you can't just fork a project, make a trivial one-line change, call it a derivative work, and replace the license on the unmodified portions of the code base with an entirely different one. If that was the case, there would be no purpose whatsoever to having any license restrictions at all, because that loop-hole would allow anyone to trivially remove the license restrictions at will.
This is all unrelated to copyleft btw.
> you can't just fork a project, make, a trivial one-line change, call it a derivative work, and replace the license
yes you can
"You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications"
You can reproduce and distribute. That isn't even remotely the same as saying you can sub-license or re-license code that you don't own the copyright on.
Source code is generally copyrighted by its author (or the author's employer, in the case of work for hire). If you wish to use, reproduce, or distribute code that you don't own the copyright of, you need a license to do so, and you must follow the terms of the license.
If you include that work in your own derivative work, and you choose to make your derivative work be open source (which is entirely optional with permissive licenses), then for any unmodified portions of the code you must comply with the original license. This is because you are inherently reproducing and distributing copyrighted source code that you didn't write and don't hold the copyright for. You have no ability to change the license on that unmodified code, as you aren't the copyright holder, the license does not grant you ownership, and you must continue to comply with the original license terms to include that code in your open source repo at all.