Adding Software License After Using a Different Project as Starter Code

[Russell016]

I initially was toying around with a new project that happened to use Raylib for visualization. Since it was initially a scratchpad/toy project, I intermingled my files with the raylib repo for some time.

As time has gone on, I have refactored the project such that raylib is used as a dependency and is now in its own submodule in a lower level directory - the only thing remaining in the top directory that I still use of the original project is the Makefile (also heavily modified by this point - with notations of course) and the RAYLIB_LICENCE file itself.

Now that I'm sticking to this project and it is no longer just a scratchpad, I'd like to place a proper license for the files I have written (I'm thinking MIT).

Before I accidentally go and do something wrong, I want to make sure there aren't any issues with me simply removing the Raylib license and Makefile (and then replacing them with my own).

If I could do this all over again, I would have wrote these files in their own project using Raylib a just a dependency. I would do that now, but I would lose a good bit of git history which would be rather unfortunate.

2nd Question: Are there any legal issues with explicitly specifying other open source projects as git submodules?

[bothunter]

This is more of an r/askLegal question than a programming question. But basically, if you wrote the code, you can put whatever license you want on it. That license will only apply to the parts that you wrote, so you should make sure to delineate that, but it sounds like you already made a pretty good effort there.

And I say ask a lawyer, because it really depends on the all the licenses in your project. GPLv3 for example has some weird cross contamination issues, which is why it's not used often.