"James A. Treacy" wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 11:15:08PM -0500, Curtis L. Olson wrote: > > Question: for a particular source file, if a person contributed a > > minor patch or tweak to compile on a new platform, does that person > > now have a "full" say in the future of that source, or are they giving > > their changes to the author of that file to be placed under the > > license terms chosen by the primary author. > > Exactly the way I want to think of it. The law, though, seems to have > its own bizarre sense of logic. I belive that contributions are seen > as being individual items(*), like pieces of lego. You only have the > copyright on your 'pieces of lego'. Thus, if the primary author of > some code wants to release future versions under a different license > and a contributor disagrees, then the primary author would need to > back out the contributed code. > > Obviously, as code evolves it becomes less clear who contributed what.
That's also my point of view. If you want to change the licence you must ask every contributor. If one doesn't answer or one rejects the change (you'll have to assume the worst) you must roll these commits back before you change the license. There's no other way to do it. Code that has grown over the time is thus quite impossible to convert to a new license with out implementing it in a clean room. As this sounds like *very* much work to me and all of us have no spare time (if they'd had they'd be improoving FGFS...) I can't see the FGFS changing the license in the near future. If a company needs a differnt licence they could do it if they have the resources... (have a look at the Wine project as a reference) To make this kind of stuff easier in the future we could try to ask every contributor to give the copyright to someone. E.g. to Curt or "The FlightGear project" (whatever that means - probably only legal if there's an official organisation like the KDE league; Mantis does that) Appart from this legal stuff I really dislike 2 different licenses in the FGFS pakage (or SimGear, or ...). All the files should have the same license. That was IIRC one the reasons for seperating SimGear. I also can's see any benefit for changing FGFS itself to LGPL. So I grant permission to move any code that I produced (mostly, but not only, patches and bug fixes) to SimGear and change the License for that purpose only to the LGPL. Code that remains in FGFS itself has to stay under GPL. CU, Christian -- The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montague _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
