On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 8:39 AM Hanno Böck <ha...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > *If* Gentoo decides to go this relicensing way I'd recommend to only do > that if it's coordinated with organizations that have deep legal > knowledge of these issues (e.g. like software freedom conservancy) and > if some lawyers that know this stuff well approve the plan. >
IMO no organization has "deep legal knowledge" of these issues, because as far as I'm aware something like this has never been done and tested in court. Really there are only a handful of legal cases at all that deal with copyleft and FOSS relicensing. There is no end of lawyers who will hand-wave on the issue. I think the bottom line is that doing something like this is legally risky, because until something like this has been done successfully many times it is novel. You're never going to find a lawyer who will sign off saying "this is safe and definitely legal." The only way you could make something like this risk-free would be to get governments around the world to pass laws setting up requirements for FOSS-relicensing without the consent of all contributors. The best we can do is mitigate risks, if we elect to do something like this. That can include being transparent, giving notice, having a way to opt out, and so on. Then when somebody sends us a cease and desist notice we just tell them no problem, their contributions will be treated as v2-only. That doesn't completely prevent them from suing us, but it would mitigate the impact, and probably make it unlikely that most would sue in the first place. Really, with something like this that is the best you're ever going to be able to hope for. If you don't want to do something unless a lawyer can guarantee that it can't be found to be a tort by a court, then you definitely don't want to pursue this change, unless we only make it forward-going for new contributions and carefully track existing code, and I doubt that will ever be very practical, so you might as well just give up and say we'll be v2 forever because that's how things were set up 20 years ago. -- Rich