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Certain licenses are listed as compatible with CC-SA on their website. If I have something that is CC-SA, say, version 3, can I redistribute it under CC-SA version 4, even if I made no modifications. To be clear, I would be following all the other requirements that CC-SA gives for this.
In general, how often do licenses require this? (Apparently BSD doesn't.)
The reason I ask is because it is important for this Meta post: Here is a way we can update all the code to a compatible license.
In general: NO: you cannot modify a license (nor the copyright holder), but if the license explicitly allow you to "upgrade" the license (like LGPL to GPL, GPL2+ to GPL3, etc.).
You can act as if you distribute it with an other compatible license.
In general upgrading code with a new license is very tedious work, and you need to have the permission of all (or most) copyright holders. Wikipedia had a nice support of FSF with a one time license versioning trick. Openstreetmap removed the old data (if contributors didn't explicitly agree with license change). Note: it took years.
You can only license your own work. If you have not made any modifications, you have not made a derived work, so you have no copyright on anything, and you have no right to change the license at all.
