== Quote from Yigal Chripun (yigal...@gmail.com)'s article > On 13/11/2009 20:51, Walter Bright wrote: > > Yigal Chripun wrote: > >> [...] > > > > On dsource you wrote: "The current situation requires to get an explicit > > permission to change the license from each contributor for his code and > > if someone cannot be contacted for any reason, his contribution cannot > > be re-licensed." > > > > That's a big problem. The only solution I can see is to relicense with > > the Boost license whatever you can of Tango. We faced the same issue > > with Phobos, and we're just going to dump what cannot be relicensed. > This is very important IMO, probably as important as the license itself. > This is exactly why the GNU project rejects contributions even if they > are licensed under the GPL unless the the contributer agrees to give > ownership of the copyright to the FSF (the legal entity for the GNU > project). > Almost all open source projects do the same. a notable exception is the > linux kernel and I think this influenced the decision to not upgrade to > GPL3. > Does that mean that all of Phobos is under one legal entity - Digital > Mars I presume? If not, than it really should be and you should require > the same policy for future contributions. > I don't want to see each module licensed under a different person > (Andrei, Sean, You, etc..).
I personally would have a hard time giving the copyright up for stuff that I worked on without pay. I don't mind licensing it permissively, but the idea that it's even possible (even if it's not likely) for someone to prevent me from relicensing subsequent versions own code under whatever terms I want bothers me. For example, let's say that (hypothetically, not that this has any chance of happening) that Digital Mars switched to GPL for Phobos. If I had given them the copyright to my code, I wouldn't be able to keep the stuff I wrote permissively licensed.