Actually, Brian is only partly correct, but asking permission is the right
thing to do regardless...
The reason why he is only partly correct is because it depends on the
copyright on the contributed code, not who made the commits.
If the copyright is lucene.com, then this isn't an issue because Doug is the
one who "owns" the code and can do with it as he wants. This is how Justin
Wells was able to change the license on Webmacro...he made people give up
the copyright on their contributions exactly for this purpose.
If other people have been putting their copyrights on the contributions,
then that is where the trouble starts and permission must be granted to
change the license because the code is owned by a bazillion different
people.
The ASF also has a policy that the code must be copyright to the ASF as well
for this purpose. That way, it is the ASF which can control the code and
distribution of the code.
Thanks,
-jon
on 6/7/01 2:18 PM, "Doug Cutting" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Brian makes a good point below:
>
>> From: Brian Goetz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>>
>> [... ] there is an issue with changing the license, and that
>> is you have to get permission from all contributors. Under GPL, any
>> contributor retains an ownership in the changes they make and
>> therefore in the work as a whole. This is part of the GPL's intent;
>> once enough people contribute, it becomes effectively impossible to
>> closed-source the code because you'd have to get too many permissions.
>>
>> The number of people who contributed actual code to Lucene is pretty
>> small, but technically you should go around and get their permission,
>> as they are joint copyright holders.
>>
>> For the record, I hereby transfer any copyright interest in any
>> software I've contributed to the Lucene project to you to or to
>> whoever you name as the copyright holding agent for the Lucene
>> project.
>
> Thanks, Brian, for pointing this out.
>
> I just went through the CVS commit messages, and identified the following
> folks:
> briangoetz
> cutting
> drag0n2
> latchkey
> otis
>
> Can each of these folks send a message telling whether or not they would
> agree to change the license on Lucene to Apache's? Now's your chance to
> veto or OK the move to Jakarta.
>
> Doug
>
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