On 7/18/2017 14:40, Alex Miller wrote: > > If all of the nontrivial contributors to the project decide they > want to change the license later, do we also need to obtain Rich's > assent? > > > This has nothing to do with Rich or the contributors. The project is > available as open source under a license and you may only modify and > distribute the code under the terms of the license. In this case, EPL > requires that derivative code be released under EPL afaik.
My point was that the license under which code is distributed can be changed, with the assent of all contributors. (One of the practical rationales of CAs is that the assignee then has ultimate latitude to change the license, without having to clear that administrative hurdle.) If in some future where project X is forked to be independent of an entity that previously was a (yes, joint) copyright assignee, do the project leads for X have to obtain that entity's agreement in order to change the license? Questions about relicensing are sort of comical IMO in the context of a project the size and importance of nREPL, but they and everything else related to licensing questions come up on a regular basis in the context of having a CA, and the answers end up mattering to contributors. > > > (Parenthetically, it strikes me as very strange for a project to > have a > copyright assignment to an individual that hasn't lodged any > commits, at > least insofar as the project gone "solo". It's interesting that I > don't > have that intuition if the assignee is an org like Apache or > whatever, a > discrepancy that I'll have to think on.) > > > Afaik, this is not at all strange and is (legally) the exact same > thing. Note that the copyright assignment in the Clojure Contributor > Agreement is a *joint* copyright ownership. While rights are granted > to Rich, they are also fully retained by the original author, which > may imply that a "reboot" could include your original work and make > derivatives of it without being pursuant to whatever the contrib > version is doing. That would not automatically to other authors > changes, but presumably they could make the same determination. Again, > this is not legal advice, and this may not be correct - please read > the CA and pursue better advice to make that judgement. Yes, it's legally the same thing, but I don't think it'd be controversial to say that assigning copyright to an individual has very different practical and qualitative consequences compared to an organization like Apache or FSF or Linux Foundation. Reams more could be written about CAs and foundations (or not) and all that, but this is already treading too far OT. :-) FWIW, I had intended my legal questions previously to be rhetorical (though I appreciate the qualified answers that confirmed my intuitions); I think the broader point is that, insofar as an independent project isn't going to benefit from being in contrib any longer, if it's possible, I see no reason to carry that legacy. For better or worse, the commit history of nREPL is such that a reboot is quite reasonable as you describe, i.e. taking my commits, re-forming a project, and applying all of the changes from other contributors that agree to come along. Any differential is going to be relatively trivial to straighten out. (Sorry for any duplicate mails. I'm out of practice w.r.t. ML reply-all habits!) - Chas -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
