Open Source Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people organizing, marketing or licensing open source development projects. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The MIT licence contains
Permission is hereby granted,[..] to sell copies of the Software
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
I know that Bootstrap uses the MIT licence, I also see thousand of Bootstrap templates sold on various platforms. Does it imply, that they are all under the MIT licence and that each buyer may sell them as often as he wants?
No. If Bootstrap were conveyed under GPL, or another copyleft free licence, and if templates were (in copyright terms) derivative works of Bootstrap, then the templates would be required to be conveyed under GPL also, and could be distributed as you have described (though the buyers in your example would have to resell them with GPL rights attached, which might not be a great business model).
But the MIT licence, like the other weak free licences, does not require that derivatives are distributed under the same terms. It is perfectly lawful to mix proprietary and MIT-licensed software, and the proprietary software does not become implicitly freely-licensed by this.
You will have to examine each of these Bootstrap templates for the terms that govern the purchase, and if (as is likely) they are non-free, you have no more right to sell copies of them than you do with, say, Microsoft Office.
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies, unless the software is used as fundament of a new software. I know it would not be a great business model, :), but I just see so many sold software that is using a bunch of MIT-licensed software and I wonder, where is the threshold where a modified MIT software can be licensed as non-free like Microsoft Office.
Bootstrap itself is licensed under the MIT license, but not necessarily the themes other people create. You have to follow the license that comes with the theme.
With the MIT license, you can combine MIT licensed code with code that falls under another license. But that does not mean the MIT license applies to the rest of the work.
It's not like the GPL where the GPL license applies to derivatives. With the MIT license, people who create derivatives can release their changes under any license they want. The new license applies to their contributions only, and the MIT license applies to the original author's work only.
So, Bootstrap themes that are not created by Bootstrap are not licensed by Bootstrap. The MIT license from Boostrap only applies to stuff that Bootstrap created. Any other author can license their work as they see fit and charge you for their theme.
