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  • So from reading point "a." it seems that "the above copyright notice" for the original SymPy code is retained by John Doe and that John Doe is licensing the new contributions to the fork under the same license but that the new additions are copyrighted to John Doe. Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 2:35
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    @moorepants for this instance, that would appear to be the case. And thus, if SymPy wants to license those back into its code, it would also need to follow that statement in the licensing and retain the copyright notice by John Doe. Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 3:59
  • Thanks @MichaelT for the answer. What do I need to ask the 450 people for? It seems that all I need to do is copy the license from the fork (including the John Doe copyright statement), and just append it into NOTICES file, where we would store all 3rd party licenses. Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 16:20
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    @OndřejČertík if you ever want to change the license on SymPy (this is working on the assumption that everyone who has submitted a pull request is ok with licensing it under the BSD) to say... GPL, you need the permission of everyone who has contributed as only they can decide to relicense it under another license. Apache has a rather involved CLA. Many big projects have a CLA of some sort or another to make sure the project is within its rights to distribute the submitted code Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 16:24
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    I'd suggest looking at the first bullet point of discourse CLA: You grant to "The Company" (Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.) a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, relicenseable, transferable license under all of Your relevant intellectual property rights, to use, copy, prepare derivative works of, distribute and publicly perform and display "The Contributions" on any licensing terms, including without limitation: (a) open source licenses like the GNU General Public (v2.0) license; ... Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 16:27