The thing is, contributors hold an implicit copyright to any work they produce. So, it&#x27;s not possible to change the license without either extracting code contributions or gaining approval from all contributors. That&#x27;s why many GPL&#x2F;LGPL projects couldn&#x27;t change licenses, even if they wanted to.<p>Sufficiently unrestrictive licenses (ex MIT) allow anybody to use the code for whatever their purpose, commercial or otherwise. Even then, prior art limits others from seizing ownership and limiting access to the original creators&#x2F;contributors.<p><i>Disclaimer: IANAL but this is only my understanding from working in OSS.</i>