I have previously written a lot of code that is hosted on a public repo on GitHub, but it never had a license. It was written as part of my work while working for a non-commercial academic entity, and I would like to add a license before the link to the repo will be included in something that will be made public, potentially attracting one or two visitors.

This leaves me with a couple of questions:

Can I just add a license after the fact and it will be valid for all prior work?
Do I have to make sure the license is included in all branches of the repo, or does this not matter? There are for instance a couple of branches that are used to freeze the state of code at a certain time for reproducibility's sake (I know this could be solved in a better way, but that's how it is).
I have myself reused some of the code in my current work for a commercial entity (internal analysis work, only distributed within the organization). Should this influence the type of license I choose? I am considering a GPL-license, but should I go with (what I believe to be) a more permissive license like MIT because of this?

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[–] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I am not a lawyer. I am a software dev. My understanding of this is solely based on projects going from open source to source available/more commercial licenses (Redis, Mongo, Elastic etc)

The license change won’t apply retroactively - I am not sure theres a legal way to retroactively change licenses and terms? I am recalling back to the Unity runtime fee, which they wanted to apply retroactively, but there was a lot of noise/discussion on whether it was legal to even do this.
Once you have main released version of the repo that contains the license you want to use going forward, any branches from that point should contain license by default? Since its just a file in the main branch.
Since you are using it commercially, and want to change the license for future versions, you will absolutely want to discuss this with whatever entity is using it. You could choose a license they refuse to accept, and end up not being able to use any future releases. My employer will not use copy-left style licenses for example.

You also should keep in mind any other dependencies you have, and what licenses they have. It may influence what licenses you can use, or whether you can continue to use a certain dependency

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I am not sure theres a legal way to retroactively change licenses and terms?

I don't think this is really true. If you own the code you can licence it as many times and in as many ways as you want. You just say that you are licensing existing versions and it becomes true. Probably a good idea to write that down somewhere (maybe in the LICENSE file) to make a "paper trail" in case you ever need to document this license.

You generally can't retroactively change a license, such as revoking it. But licences may have revocation terms. But it doesn't really matter what existing licences are on a code, you can always add new licences if you own it.

A silly example. If I own some code I can say "Anyone standing on their left foot can use this code". That doesn't stop me from later saying "Anyone standing on their right foot can use this code". But licenses are still valid, and I haven't change the first one. But now people can choose which license they would like to use.

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