>On 1/17/07, Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer at sun.com> wrote: >> >>>>> "WJ" == William James <williamjamesgnusolaris at gmail.com> writes: >> >> WJ> What happens if I contribute something to Opensolaris as CDDL >> WJ> code. Does this mean that everything could be contributed under >> WJ> CPL1.0 to someone else? >> >> IANAL, but I believe that in the general case, the answer is "yes". If >> you contribute code directly to OpenSolaris, you must sign a joint >> copyright assignment. My understanding is that this gives Sun the >> authority to distribute the code under a different license. You, of >> course, retain (joint) ownership of the code and can distribute it under >> any license you choose. > >What happens if the existing license of the code is incompatible to >the CDDL or GPLv3?
Doesn't matter; the copyright owner(s) can do what they want with the code and its license. If I write code and release it under the GPL, I can then later re-release it under the BSD license or the CDDL or even stop publishing changes I make; if, however, the code was modified by others and the copyright was not assigned back to me, I cannot distribute those changes under a different license. I have no knowledge about the status of all GPLv2'ed source code, but I can imagine that quite a few projects cannot change their license, unless they kept track of source code changes. (Come to think of it, I have suggested changes to gcc which were later incorporated without ever signing off on copyright) Casper
