Comment by esperent
5 months ago
> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code
For any small to medium sized projects with zero external contributors, it's highly unlikely that anyone would pursue legal action so the person who owns the project does de facto have this right whether or not it's legal according to the license.
> Things get more complicated if there are external contributors
I don't think this is complicated - unless there's a contributor agreement that people have signed that says otherwise, people have copyright on the code they have contributed so the original creator doesn't have a right to relicense their code.
However, again it comes down to whether anyone would bring a legal fight and the answer is almost certainly no. Forking the code is much more likely at that point.
>> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code
> whether or not it's legal according to the license
The original author is not bound by any licence. Only the licensees are. The licence they chose to use by definition cannot bind them; they are issuing the licence.
(They are obviously bound by the licences of anything that they use, but that’s not what the person you’re replying to is talking about)
> The original author is not bound by any licence.
Yes, but this is only true if nobody else ever contributes to the software. Once the project has multiple contributors, each of these people are copyright holders of whatever they contributed, and they are the licensor for their parts of the code. So the original author is also held to the terms of the license for all contributed code.