Clarification on MIT license

Question

Hi

I am trying to under various licenses.. but MIT / BSD seems not clear in few aspects. Please give your opinion on the following about MIT license..

1. I know that MIT license allows a licensee to distribute it under a different license. But is it applicable only to derivative work or can also apply to verbatim copy of the original software?

2. MIT license says that "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." If I distribute a MIT licensed software into a say.. proprietary license which restricts distribution and modification to licensees.. then including the original MIT license becomes contradictory.. because it allows distribution / modification. Should I only use the copyright text from the original MIT license of that software and then define my proprietary license terms ?

Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

1. You can apply a different license to a code licensed as MIT/Expat as long as it doesn't contradict the few restrictions of original license. Including to a verbatim copy.

2. As far as I understand, you are only required to keep the copyright notice in the source code, not in some specific form in program output.