It was Sebastian Trüg who said at the right time 17.07.2009 09:33 the following words:
On Thursday 16 July 2009 17:47:29 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
On Monday 13 July 2009 16:10:31 Sebastian Trüg wrote:
* Copyright: none of the files contain a copyright header atm. We need to
  settle on the licence and then add a header to all files. Also atm the
  documentation stated that the ontos are (C) Nepomuk consortium which
does not exist anymore. Question is: who is it now?
Do you need legal advice? A code license such as LGPL or so might not be
what we want, and changing license at some later point will cause a lot of
headaches, so better be safe now ...

Also note that copyright is different from the license, without knowing the
copyright holder(s), it's impossible to change a license. Probably a good
idea to add those anyway.

So if legal advice on that is needed, the KDE e.V. can help providing this.
Let me know in that case...

I would appreciate your help.
So far we have only Leo's opinion on the licence issue and I cannot really give a qualifies answer to his proposal. It would, thus, be great if you could look at it.
The copyright should be the person who wrote it, or the company who employs the person who wrote it at the time of writing. Usually, based on IP contracts of companies, no employed person can freely contribute to open source projects without a written consent by the employer without risking legal issues later. Some companies have quite nice IP contracts and then it works.
Copyright is also not easy to transfer, at least according to german law.

Existing copyright:
It is not allowed to change a license of existing code for other parties than the copyright holder. For all NEPOMUK contributions, I have ensured that copyright is on the nepomuk consortium with shared copyright, so every nepomuk consortium member can freely relicense code. Nevertheless, I have seen that for NEPOMUK contributions, we have used compatible licenses, and I have, as I am responsible for OSCAF from the DFKI side, all means to do whatever is needed with NEPOMUK ontologies (besides changing the copyrgith)

new code:
whatever we want.

best
Leo
Cheers,
Sebastian
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