We need to ask every contributor. Unless you've done something to assign
your copyright to someone else, (or some other law applies like you create
something as part of your job) you still own the copyright to your own
work. In many jurisdictions transferring copyright requires an actual
signed document. So in the case of fish nothing like that has happened so
every contributor owns the copyright to their own contribution.
Anyone who contributes to fish can be assumed to license their contribution
under the license that fish uses, which currently is GPL v2 only.
GPLv2-only does not allow relicensing under a different version, so to do
such a relicense you need the approval of every copyright holder. If we
fail to contact some contributors of small patches (or they refuse to
relicense) we could choose to rewrite those small contributions, replacing
their code, or we could add something to the licensing file saying that
"such and such contributions are for historical reasons not under GPLv2+"
and deal with the problem if we actually want to move fish off GPLv2. (By
that time their contribution may have already been rewritten or removed,
and if not rewriting a few small pieces of code is much easier than trying
to relicense all of fish at that time.) If any major contributor cannot be
contacted or does not wish to relicense, the relicensing is probably a
no-go.
The only place fish mentions the license is in doc_src/license.hdr. I don't
know if that is a problem and if there should be a copyright+license
statement in every source file as the FSF recommends.
According to git, there are currently 20 authors of commits who have more
than 10 commits in the tree (and a few of those are duplicate names for the
same person), and there are 108 committers in total.
On 29 May 2013 10:20, dag.odenh...@gmail.com <dag.odenh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Me too, but do we actually need to ask every contributor? I'm not sure
> how the GPL works but it seems the copyright is assigned exclusively to
> Axel, so perhaps he has the final and only say in the matter. Of course
> discussing it is always good but it might be impractical to contact every
> contributor ever.
>
> I'll also note that the license file is not included in the source tree or
> mentioned in the readme.
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:17 AM, David Adam <zanc...@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au>wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 28 May 2013, Jan Kanis wrote:
>> > So, what do people think about this, and specifically, are there any
>> > current contributors who are opposed to relicensing their code under
>> > GPLv2+?
>> >
>> > If it is decided that moving to GPLv2+ is desirable, I volunteer to
>> take on
>> > the effort of contacting all current copyright holders.
>>
>> It sounds like a good idea, and I would be happy to relicense my
>> contributions.
>>
>> David Adam
>> zanc...@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
>>
>>
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>
>
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