Hi all, All GSoC 2007 students received the book "Producing Open Source Software", by Karl Fogel. I read it carefully because I knew that it will be useful in some moment. I think this is that moment.
As Tom said, we can switch to a more restrictive license that BSD without going back to all the people that contributed a single line in the past. For preventing this on the future, maybe CLA can be required for contributing to the project. It requires a little bit of time filling them, and makes clear that the copyright of the code is property of the ArgoUML project. See http://www.producingoss.com/en/legal.html for more info on CLAs. My first thought about the license issue was switching to GPL. I'm near to be sure that I won't earn any money developing ArgoUML or derivates (Google SOC 's payments apart) - maybe this is an egoist thought, I know- , so I wish that everyone who makes derivated works with ArgoUML code MUST return back something to the community. But if we are going to focus on using Eclipse, I think that switching to the EPL will be coherent. Anyway, I'll be happy with any opensource license. But I think that the decision has to be definitive. Tom said that > ArgoUML could switch to the GPL v2 now, and announce that it will consider > requests for a different license. This would allow any serious large > companies to approach ArgoUML to do extensions. Changing the license causes confusion (and maybe some kind of insecurity, for using our data format) to ArgoUML users, and don't know if dual licensing is a good idea. I think that this discussion is delaying the next release of ArgoUML, so I hope that we'll find a consensus soon. -- Regards, Christian López Espínola
