> Relicensing code is tricky > even when you can contact the original author. If you can't, then > you typically have to wait 75 years, which is a bit tricky. One > possible solution is that contributors agree that, in the event that > they can't be contacted by some pre-arranged mechanism (e.g. mailing > list, posting in a certain newspaper, whatever) for a year then the > project gains the right to relicense any code they have contributed. > I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy with this though (doing it myself, > or expecting others to do it).
Which is most likely the very reason FSF requires copyright assignment from all contributors to their projects? I don't disagree with your suggestion of the idea of the pre-arranged mechanishm, and it's probably less scary than a copyright assignment requirement, but it seems like we could be wandering into dangerous legal territory. Any code contributed to the project would then need a special "This license expires if I can't be contacted" clause, I would think, so we'd basically be inventing our own license and requiring that of each contribution. I think the best and easiest option is probably just to favor BSD/ISC/MIT/public domain code, so that we don't have to worry (much) about moving code around. J. _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
