On 18/04/2019 04:56, Jeremy Huntwork wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 14:18 Jeremy Huntwork > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> > wrote: > > > Looking a little closer, it looks like contributors to a GPL-based > project maintain copyright on their own contributions. That being > said, the whole point of a license like that is to allow free use and > duplication, provided the license stays with the work. To change the > license, we would need to have permission from contributors whose code > remains, but there's nothing that prevents us from hosting it > somewhere else and even modifying it. > > > > Reflecting even further, it does seem like we only halfway set up the license. > I implied GPL 2 by adding that alongside the code, but I didn’t explicitly > define that anywhere. It seems the copy of the license still has template > values. > > Regardless of whether you move it or not, it would probably make sense to get > the legal status under control... > > If we assume that the code is actually valid GPL'd, then you could change the > license if you get consent from those who have contributed to the _current_ > code. Or, if that's not possible to do, you could replace those parts of the > code with new/different code and then you should be able to place it under a > new license. > > Anyway, just some suggestions.
The only place where the license is referenced (outside the LICENSE file itself) is in "./jhalfs -v": ------ "jhalfs" builder tool (development) $Rev: 4098 $ $Date: 2019-04-17 09:06:13 +0200 (mer. 17 avril 2019) $ Written by George Boudreau, Manuel Canales Esparcia, Pierre Labastie, plus several contributions. Based on an idea from Jeremy Huntwork This set of files are published under the Gnu General Public License, Version 2. See the LICENCE file in this directory. ------ Note that I am responsible for adding the "See the LICENCE..." line (with the typo, fixed at rev 4099), and my name. All the others have been there since rev 3070 (the first line was slightly modified depending on releases). But item 0 of the license tells: "This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License." We do not have that (at least not with the word "distributed"). So it is questionable whether jhalfs is licensed at all. Note: I am not a lawyer, and English is not my native language, so I may well be wrong. So I'd like to be sure that jhalfs is licensed before moving: if not, I or any author may be deemed as responsible for any modification made to the files by some third party. I do not fear somebody would try to reserve rights to jhalf, but I fear somebody adding bogus, or even unlawful code or statements, and not mentioning his/her name. Note that as long as jhalfs is hosted on higgs, we can say that this is the only official implementation. This would be more difficult if it had already been moved once. Here is what I propose, but I do not know whether it is practical: - Add a copyright notice and disclaimer as suggested by the LICENSE, to each file which can accept it: shell scripts, README and other text files, xml, dtd and xsl stylesheets (unless taken from another project of course). Some files may not accept it (e.g. optimize/opt_override), but most will. - Add one or several copyright holder(s) in the copyright notices. The better would be to have all the names of contributors, with active years, as copyright holders: for example: # Copyright (C) 2002-2005 Jeremy Huntwork <[email protected]> # Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Manuel Canales Esparcia <address> Maybe we could just take the current revision of a file, run "svn annotate", and put the list of contributors with the dates of their contributions as shown in the annotations. Somewhat time consuming, though... - If we need the consent of the seven persons who have contributed, ask them, but what to do if one of them does not answer? And do we really need to ask, since nothing is explicitly copyrighted? Note that I do not want to steel others' work, just make it as simple as possible to start with legal copyrights and license. Once this is done, ask Bryan (thanks for the offer, Bryan) to move to, to what actually: gitlab, github, something else? Pierre -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/alfs-discuss FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
