> By the way, if you relicense OpenThreads, I think you need to make
> sure every single contributor that has changes in the current code
> base agrees to the license change or their changes must be pulled from
> the source base. (I remember PhysFS went through this and it was quite
> an ordeal for such a small user base.)
You need to check with all the copyright owners, not all the
contributors. If you don't add a specific note that you are a
copyright owner of a particular piece of code then you can't assert
rights over it. I didn't spot any copyright notices others than that
of the "Open Threads Group", which is under Sean's control.
Actually, I don't think that's true, at least in the United States.
I'm not a lawyer, but I recently sat in on a class dealing with
patents and copyrights for engineers (taught by a lawyer), and I think
the mere act of writing automatically assigns copyright to the author.
An explicit copyright notice or (C) is not required. (This used to be
untrue in the US I believe until we adopted an international treaty or
convention in the late 80s/early 90s?, so I believe this applies to
the UK and elsewhere too.) The author must explicitly surrender their
rights to their work, not the other way around.
So I think we need to tread carefully here. Particularly, being open
source, we need to (and should) strive for a high standard of
propriety.
I'm cross-posting hoping somebody with more legal knowledge can chime in.
Thanks,
Eric
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