License changed from BSD to MIT without permission

[sparrowt]

Filing this as a separate issue so it doesn't get lost in a comment thread on the repo from which this was forked:
ESSolutions/django-mssql-backend#91 (comment)

I noticed the license of the fork has been changed from BSD 3-Clause to MIT - may I ask from whom you obtained permission to alter the license?

History of LICENSE through chain of forks (BSD, with varying authors): django-pyodbc, django-pyodbc-azure, django-mssql-backend

Thank you @vwarchu for the response:

@sparrowt - thanks for pointing this out, we'll put this through a legal review process to evaluate reverting to the BSD 3-Clause.

I trust this ticket can serve to track resolving this issue.

As well as re-instating the license it would be appropriate (if not required - I'll let you talk to the lawyers!) to retain the Copyright lines from each fork in the chain, especially the original "django-pyodbc developers" one, to acknowledge their contributions over many years - rather than just replacing them all with "Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation" on its own which I believe is incorrect.

[vwarchu]

@sparrowt - Yes, tracking this issue here is recommended. Thanks

[sparrowt]

I noticed that LICENSE.txt has now been reverted to BSD 3-Clause by 4dfb39c, thank you!

For some reason GitHub isn't displaying the license 'infobox' at the top of https://github.com/microsoft/mssql-django/blob/dev/LICENSE.txt (whereas for example the parent of this fork does) - see here re auto-detection - possibly due to this extra line at the top:

Project Name: mssql-django

[sparrowt]

The other thing mentioned in the description of this issue is the copyright notice - unfortunately this still says simply:

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation

which doesn't acknowledge the years of work by the following (from previous license files linked above):

django-pyodbc developers

Michiya Takahashi

ES Solutions AB

though I realise this may be more of a grey area, but I thought I'd point it out.

[vwarchu]

@sparrowt - Thanks for your patience - I've now updated the License.txt file in the dev branch to account for the historical copyright notices. This will be merged this week and be part of the subsequent releases.

[sparrowt]

Thank you @vwarchu. 10f0525 for the interested. Also related: aca9d26 👍