[Python-Dev] (Licensing question) backport of shutil.copyfile() functionality (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Tue Mar 12 20:53:19 EDT 2019

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 05:32:35PM -0700, Gregory P. Smith wrote:

If you might want some of this contributed back to Python later on, you should not use the GPL.

Giampaolo can always change the licence of his work later. You can't take away the GPL from work you've already released, but you can relicense the same work under any other terms.

The problem may be if others have contributed to Giampaolo's library under the GPL, and they refuse to re-licence their contributions. I am not a lawyer, but it may be that he can work around that by requiring that contributors assign their copyright in the contribution to him. But that may discourage contributors.

But since Giampaolo seems to be thinking of using the MIT licence, the point may be moot :-)

-- Steven

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