On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Mikkel Bonde <mikbo...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been maintaining a private piece of package on Github lately, that's > composed from software that's MIT licensed and BSD2 licensed and my own > source code. > > The original author(s) abandoned the project(s) and are not answering neither > mails nor "issues" on Github. > > Am I allowed to publish this as OSS on eg. Github, and if so - is it enough > to include the original licenses and give credit to original authors? I think > it gets a bit hard to figure out whenever you mix licenses. >
Yes: Taking over abandoned source code is one of the major points of open source! Some licenses mix well with others and some don't. The general point is that if two licenses have contradictory requirements, you cannot satisfy the combination of them. For the so called "short permissive" licenses like BSD and MIT, the general consensus is that they can be mixed with pretty much anything else. The only annoying part when mixing two of them together is that you must still correctly retain the license for each piece of code. So the source code file that was originally BSD licensed must retain the BSD license in its header, and likewise for the file that is MIT license. You must just be careful not to mix them. For example, you may not want to mix MIT code and BSD code into the same file, just to keep things simple. henrik PS: I like your name! In my ancestral line some hundred years ago there was a sequence of men called Mikkel. And they were of course farmers. One was even called Mikkel Mikkelsson, as his father was Mikkel too. -- henrik.i...@avoinelama.fi +358-40-5697354 skype: henrik.ingo irc: hingo www.openlife.cc My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7 _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
