Source code licensing

T

tugas

When is the proper time to append an existing license? If I modify or add few lines of code as patch to an existing source code, let say a device driver having a 4-clause BSD license and I want to append a 2-clause BSD license, then, is this an appropriate action? Thanks!
 
To your own code, that you added, you can. To that code, you can't go against theirs, which since theirs has more clauses, you can't place your license over theirs. That you can't remove clauses.

I believe you have to publish your own code, better to do that first, to show it's not of that license. It would be easier to dual license only your code to their license and to your license. Or note that your added code is not of their license in their repository. Whichever you do, note in their repository, anyway, in the NOTICE or README file. Or in your own fork.
 
sidetone said:
To your own code, that you added, you can. To that code, you can't go against theirs, which since theirs has more clauses, you can't place your license over theirs. That you can't remove clauses. I believe you have to publish your own code, better to do that first, to show it's not of that license. It would be easier to dual license your code to their license and to your license. Or note it that it's not of that license in their repository.
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Thanks for answering my question sidetone! This gives me a crystal clear understanding.
 
By the way, I could find some source code having this license below.

BSD-2-Clause

Copyright (c) YearX, Original_Author
Copyright (c) YearY, Another_Author/Contributor
All rights reserved.

When does Another_Author/Contributor gets entitled with the copyright license? Any basis for such entitlement? Is this also possible with 4-clause BSD license? An actual example is the ip_carp.c source file -> https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/plain/sys/netinet/ip_carp.c?h=releng/14.3.

Thanks!
 
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