Does this even license? license mix on a per-commit basis

Licenses
1

I’m emerging from a feature request for a forked AOSP default contacts app for mass-exporting/sharing contacts.

The code to fulfill the feature request was written and proposed by a Qualcomm innovation center (QuIC) employee sometime back in 2018/2019. It was never merged in AOSP because it was contributed under a BSD 3-clause license in an Apache 2.0 licensed codebase with its own copyright header, unclear boundaries and in very small parts refactored code lines.

Basically I pose the question if one can introduce differently permissive-licensed code on a per-commit/per-line basis and how to properly attribute this in a binary distribution form.

While I try to get back to the original authors and copyright holder to streamline the contribution license (Qualcomm IC / Linux Foundation), I do have little hope considering the time span (~5 years). So I wonder if it can be properly accommodated.

2

One can absolutely do that; the combination will be licensed under something like “Apache-2.0 AND BSD-3-Clause”: The user will have to comply with both licenses.

You can only not do that if one of the licenses by itself prohibits it. Or the terms of the licenses could be incompatible in a way that prohibits everyone from using the combination. Or something.

3

Oh, and you just wouldn’t try to track the exact licensing per line or whatever. The question of the actual terms of any part of the sources will also need to consider things like whether it is copyrightable at all; even git blame won’t be granular enough for that.