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?
Yeah to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting you can’t change the license at all, or it requires code changes or whatever.
You are completely free to apply whatever license, and use that going forward without changing the code at all.
And like you have correctly pointed out, you could rewrite git history, or even just remove all prior versions of the code.
I am of course happy to be wrong or have misunderstood something- I am absolutely not an expert and would like to be corrected if I am wrong!