Software relicensing is applied in
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
software development
Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...
when
software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both sour ...
s of software modules are
incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
able works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...
or content of several software works to create a new combined one.
Motivation and description
Sometimes open-source software projects get stuck in a license incompatibility situation. Often the only feasible way to resolve this situation is re-licensing of all participating software parts. For successful relicensing the agreement of all involved copyright holders, typically the developers, to a changed license is required. While in the
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
domain achieving 100% coverage of all authors is often impossible due to the many contributors involved, often it is assumed that a great majority is sufficient. For instance,