James A. Treacy writes: > You should get as close to 100% of the contributors to agree as you > can get. Flightgear needs to be prepared to remove any code written by > someone who disagrees or who couldn't be contacted and appears later > on. > > FWIW, wine did this earlier this year and they got all but a handful > of contributors to sign off on the change. The missing had made only > small contributions that they could easily recode if the need arose.
Question: for a particular source file, if a person contributed a minor patch or tweak to compile on a new platform, does that person now have a "full" say in the future of that source, or are they giving their changes to the author of that file to be placed under the license terms chosen by the primary author. My sense is that if it is only minor changes that were contributed by others, the primary author should be able to maintain complete "ownership" over the copyright and license terms of that code. If someone else (in addition to the main author of a particular chunk of code) contributed new code, or a major rewrite, or something else significant, then we start getting into gray areas. It seems like the primary author of that code probably still could have final say, but basic courtesy might dictate that the major contributors at least be consulted ... (?) If that all was the case, then it still might be nearly impossible to relicense the entire project given the total number of contributors, but it might be possible to relicense a smaller sub-section of the code where the number of identifiable contributors is smaller and within reason (as long as the resulting license remained compatible with the rest of the code of course.) FWIW, this issue arrises when we consider moving code from FlightGear into SimGear. SimGear code is LGPL'd and FlightGear code is GPL'd so a license change would be required. Hoever, if we attacked this piece by piece, subsystem by subsytem, it would likely be doable. And of course, the FlightSim specific stuff would make the most sense to leave inside FlightGear, but other things like the scenery subsystem, FDM interface (?), sound manager, time tracking, model animation, properties, joystick support, etc. might make sense to migrate over to SimGear as time goes by ... Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
