On 15/11/2009 00:28, dsimcha wrote:
== 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.
I can't see how that's possible. if you contribute to Phobos under Boost
license and Phobos is re-licensed under GPL that would mean that any
future versions would be GPL but you should be able to fork your
original Boost licensed version and release subsequent versions of that
under Boost license.
The project needs to have the ability to adapt its license in the future
due to various reasons. case in point is tango: they are discussing
changing the license and maybe even go with a Phobos compatible license
to help a merger of the two code bases. this requires all contributors
(past and present) to agree to this and if somebody cannot be contacted
for whatever reason (maybe he lost interest in Tango and D) than his
code cannot be re-licensed. Big problem.
