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    so in practice, i would do this: copy a MIT project, replace everything MIT with GPL (so no trace is left of the project having been MIT), and then additionally link to the original MIT project in a few important places (not every source file though), mentioning that the base-project is available under MIT. would that be ok/legal (given i keep the original copyright owner statements)? Commented Mar 12, 2018 at 7:03
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    @hoijui You must leave all MIT license headers and permission notices intact and include them with your new project. And unless your intent is to deceive, I don’t see why you would replace all mentions of “MIT”. It won’t change anything, the parts you take will still be MIT licensed. Just add your own GPL license header below it, it will be valid for all copyrightable changes (i.e. not just renaming variables) that you make to the source code. BTW this is why most projects have a copyright header in every file. Commented Mar 27, 2018 at 17:38
  • @jmiserez ok. so lets look at one file of my project then: i leave the MIT header, make some changes and add a GPL header (as i want my changes to only be available under the GPL). now a 3rd party comming about my file would have to honor both MIT and GPL? i have never seen a file with two license headers, and i would think, most people would just choose the license they like, as they do not know what the legally right way is. also, why do i have to include the MIT, if by honoring the GPL, one automatically also honors MIT? Commented Mar 30, 2018 at 14:48
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    @hoijui Any rights you have under the MIT license come with the restriction “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.” But honestly I’m not sure if you need to keep all of the notices, or just one, IANAL. But I’m sure you need to include a notice somewhere. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be compliant with the MIT license anymore, which would mean you’d lose all rights to use the code in your project. FYI the Linux kernel has files with multiple licenses, they use SPDX headers: lwn.net/Articles/739183 Commented Mar 30, 2018 at 19:06
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    How sad is it that someone wants to attempt to GPL code that was built on a MIT license. It seems to be against everything the MIT license stands for. Commented Apr 1, 2018 at 20:36