Well, the key is making the decision together. One committer disagrees, that's it. The problem is getting to every committer, which is impossible. So there'd have to be a process with an announcement, a period for objections etc. I've heard it has been done, but IANAL. (was this on the codeplex google group? Can't find it...)
There's another question: Is Java-Hibernate, legally, really under 2.1, even if the source headers don't say so? Then again, if redhat bothers to sue, or even threats to, you can forget about it, no matter who's right... From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ayende Rahien Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 4:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [nhibernate-development] LGPL v3 for NH3 (?) Not really, no. Take a look at the Linux kernel licensing. You can't license it as anything but GPL 2, because some of the code doesn't have "or later version", so it is explicitly 2.0 Now, it is a pretty fair bet that most of the people who contributed the code wouldn't mind, but... On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Wenig, Stefan <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > To my knowledge you can't re-license code you don't own the copyright > of. True, but the community _could_ make a decision together if they really wanted. > Not sure if this is a problem, but I could imagine that code which is > ported > from Java has to inherit the same license. Funny, now that you mention it, Java-Hibernate doesn't specify the LGPL version either! /* * Hibernate, Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java * * Copyright (c) 2010, Red Hat Inc. or third-party contributors as * indicated by the @author tags or express copyright attribution * statements applied by the authors. All third-party contributions are * distributed under license by Red Hat Inc. * * This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use, modify, * copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU * Lesser General Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY * or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License * for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License * along with this distribution; if not, write to: * Free Software Foundation, Inc. * 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor * Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA */ SVN contains lgpl.txt with v2.1, but I guess that really means nothing. On hibernate.org<http://hibernate.org> it says v2.1. Again, void. > What I don't understand is that they're concerned about what to provide > for > reverse engineering but at the same time they're developing a GPL v3 > application? I think he didn't say they're using it, just that this would be an advantage. He probably guessed that nobody would care enough about only pleasing his lawyers ;-)
