Why would this be surprising? The MIT license explicitly allows to relicense a project at any point. In this case, the Bear maintainer decided to start off with a permissive license and now exercised their rights to change to a more restrictive license due to changing requirements. To me, this seems actually quite reasonable.

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4ad 5 days ago | parent [-]

The copyright holder (the author) is solely responsible for choosing how they want their work to be distributed, and is not bound by any other sort of constraint. They can choose any license at any time, and change their mind however often, and it whatever direction they want. Any previous licenses used (MIT here) bear no effect whatsoever. There is no license in the world (and cannot be) that would prohibit the copyright owner from changing it. It makes no sense, the license terms only apply to the licensee, not to the licensor.

Of course, the author cannot retroactively change the license of any previously distributed work. Anyone is free to fork off Bear from its last MIT code and do whatever they want with it.

So no, the MIT license does not "explicitly allow to relicense a project at any point" (emphasis mine). The MIT license allows licensees to license their derived work however they see fit, it has no effect on the relicensing by the licensor (the copyright holder).

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jotaen 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, sorry if my terminology was unclear here: by “relicense” I colloquially meant to say “assign a different license to the project that is applicable for any work from that point onwards”.

> Any previous licenses used (MIT here) bear no effect whatsoever. There is no license in the world (and cannot be) that would prohibit the copyright owner from changing it.

I don’t think it’s that simple. The Bear project appears to have accepted external contributions under the original license, so the project is subject to that license as long as those contributions remain.

It may not be a big practical issue in this case, due to the MIT license being quite permissive, but if the project was e.g. GPL-licensed, the maintainer wouldn’t trivially be able to change the license in “whatever direction they want”. (And by “trivial” I mean without e.g. rewriting or discarding the external contributions.)

	▲	4ad 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It appears that Bear does not accept contributions[1] and the very few contributors it had in the past only contributed a trivial amount of code[2]. But you're right, relicensing requires the approval of all copyright holders, and in general there can be many. Of course many projects require the prospecting contributor sign a CLA where they relinquish their rights to the project in order to be able to contribute. Personally while I have signed some CLAs, such as the Go one where I retained my rights, I'd never sign one which required me to give away my copyright rights, precisely so they wouldn't be able to do a rugpull on me. I believe that copyright law is the biggest weapon one has against open source rugpulls and one should not give it away. [1] https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/CONTR... [2] https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo...