One other thing you may have to do if you have contributors who have also committed code is to get their permission to change the license as well, as the code they committed may still be under their copyright and not yours, and they can choose to allow their code to be relicensed or not. Some projects use a contributor release to reassign copyright for contributions for reasons like this, for instance. This is partly the reason why the Linux kernel has never changed to GPLv3 and still uses GPLv2 (and also because Linus just doesn’t like some provisions of the GPLv3) — it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone who contributed code to a project as large as the kernel to agree to a license change. Any code that couldn’t be changed would need to be extracted and rewritten, and that’s not going to happen given the sheer size of the code base.
If you don’t have other contributors then you’re home free. You can’t retroactively change licenses to existing copies of the code that have been distributed, but you can change it going forward.
Can someone help me? I have been licencing my code under BSD2Clause, I wish to switch to gplv3. How do I switch?
Thank you
Here is a guide from the GNU website: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
Thank you so much. This is exactly what I needed
One other thing you may have to do if you have contributors who have also committed code is to get their permission to change the license as well, as the code they committed may still be under their copyright and not yours, and they can choose to allow their code to be relicensed or not. Some projects use a contributor release to reassign copyright for contributions for reasons like this, for instance. This is partly the reason why the Linux kernel has never changed to GPLv3 and still uses GPLv2 (and also because Linus just doesn’t like some provisions of the GPLv3) — it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone who contributed code to a project as large as the kernel to agree to a license change. Any code that couldn’t be changed would need to be extracted and rewritten, and that’s not going to happen given the sheer size of the code base.
If you don’t have other contributors then you’re home free. You can’t retroactively change licenses to existing copies of the code that have been distributed, but you can change it going forward.
Delete the current LICENSE file in your repository and replace it with the new one.
You don’t have to put your name, year etc anywhere, the license is valid for the entire repo. You are not filing for an IP, it’s just a usage license.
Note that all the legal jargon is not necessary, you can write one yourself as long as you make it clear what you allow and what you don’t allow.
I.e. “don’t be a dick” requires elaboration, “do not use my code if you intend to make money off of it or parts of it” is clear and legally binding.
So just replace my old licence file with the GPL?
Yeah.