On 18/05/16 19:06, Rob Owens wrote:
>>> requirement to transfer ownership of contributions to the official
>>> version so that someone would have the authority to change the license
>>> on future versions if desired - but it may already be too late for
>>> that.
>>From the CVS log, the only three authors (committers) are: cbarratt,
tobiasly, gfk. However, I *believe* a few of the patches that are
committed by one of these three, but come from somebody posting a patch
to the mailing list. We really have a hard time figuring that out. It
may be too late, unless we want to scour the mailing list way back and
find all the patches and authors.
It's doable, but time consuming. And then we need to contact these
persons by the email they posted and hope to get a reply. If the email
still exists – if not, we have to figure out the new email address and
try again.
> As Les said, a CLA would give the project owner the ability to change the
> license
> in the future. That includes the ability to change it to a proprietary
> license.
I think some people wouldn't want to sign anything that includes the
ability to change it to a proprietary license.
> The GPL version of the code would still be available as GPL, but that same
> code
> could be sold in a proprietary product at the will of the project owner.
Most free and open source software isn't sold as a product, but made
money from by providing services around it. I'm not sure who'd buy free
software.
Also, we don't really have a legal entity here, do we? I hardly think a
Sourceforge project by itself is considered by any courtroom as a legal
entity. The CLAs for GNU projects have the FSF as the rights owner.
Linux has The Linux Foundation. We must not make people sign it over to
any one person.
> For this reason, a lot of people frown on CLA requirements. Look up "Ubuntu
> CLA"
> if you want to see what kind of trouble CLAs can cause.
True. We wouldn't want to make anyone refrain from contributing because
of a CLA, I think.
What we should make sure of, is that all contributors, agree for their
patch to have the GPL-2 software license, or later versions of the same
license, as published by the Free Software Foundation. Maybe that's
given as they make a PR to a GPL-2 project, so it's not really needed?
--
Best regards,
Lars Tobias
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