<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>chubot</author><text>The GPL relies on copyright as far as I understand.&lt;p&gt;The two declining authors don&amp;#x27;t have copyright on the new replacement code, because they didn&amp;#x27;t write it.  So their choice of license can&amp;#x27;t possibly have any bearing on the license of the rest of the project.&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happened when the busybox maintainer forked the project to toybox.&lt;p&gt;busybox is a GPLv2 project (not LPGL), and so all his contributions were licensed as such.  But he forked his own code to a Apache 2 License.  He is able to do that because he owns the copyright.  But of course he can&amp;#x27;t relicense code to which he doesn&amp;#x27;t own the copyright.&lt;p&gt;toybox isn&amp;#x27;t a derivative work of busybox in that sense.  It&amp;#x27;s just a bunch of code that someone wrote (and automatically gets copyright for), and chose to license in a certain way.&lt;p&gt;Basically you get the copyright first, then you decide to license it.  If it&amp;#x27;s clearer to think about, the authors could have started a new project called &amp;quot;Zacket&amp;quot; that&amp;#x27;s not a derivative work of Racket, as long as they own all the copyrights.  But the name doesn&amp;#x27;t matter here, and they can keep using &amp;quot;Racket&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s my understanding anyway.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dumbmatter</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Two people declined to re-license their contributions to Racket. We therefore removed their contributions and, where appropriate, replaced them with new code and&amp;#x2F;or documentation.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is that actually allowed by the GPL? I thought it was more like the &amp;quot;Ship of Theseus&amp;quot; - that even if you eventually replace all the original GPL code, the entire work remains GPLed. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;260347&amp;#x2F;ship-of-theseus-applied-to-gpl-can-i-relicense-my-program-if-i-replace-all-of&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;2603...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Completing Racket&apos;s relicensing effort</title><url>https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-relicensing-effort.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>xiaq</author><text>IANAL, but I think of the relicensing effort as conceptually equivalent to starting from scratch and asking everyone to re-contribute their code towards the new codebase, because these contributors never relinquished their copyright in the first place. For people who said no, you just leave out their contributions.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dumbmatter</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Two people declined to re-license their contributions to Racket. We therefore removed their contributions and, where appropriate, replaced them with new code and&amp;#x2F;or documentation.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is that actually allowed by the GPL? I thought it was more like the &amp;quot;Ship of Theseus&amp;quot; - that even if you eventually replace all the original GPL code, the entire work remains GPLed. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;260347&amp;#x2F;ship-of-theseus-applied-to-gpl-can-i-relicense-my-program-if-i-replace-all-of&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;2603...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Completing Racket&apos;s relicensing effort</title><url>https://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/11/completing-racket-s-relicensing-effort.html</url></story>