"Curtis L. Olson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > 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 ... (?) >
This could be a concern for a legal department in a company considering using code down the road. It seems unlikely that anyone with a trivial contribution would sue "the project" if they were not given "full say". Ethically I would say yes, since the conditions under which the contribution took place were clearly stated by GPL. Ethics are extremely important in the open source community, and should I think be considered before legal liability. Whether or not someone could or would take legal action or would spend the money to defend against legal action should not be the primary concern. > 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.) > At least two or three of the authors of the 3D models that I solicited for the project would not want their work released under LGPL (I understand this isn't necessarily what you had in mind). > 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 ... > This would be the best approach I think, so long as authors are consulted. Generally I feel the same as David about the code I've created. But, fundamentally I think that David's concern about the pretentiousness in the GPL or LGPL is unwarranted. It isn't about whether or not someone would actually afford to defend their rights faced with abuses by a large company. GPL and LGPL are as much social contracts as they are legal contracts. They have recognizable meaning that could be disrupted, if too many projects sought less restrictive licensing without good reason. That said, the age of this project and the large number of contributors makes it difficult to do this conversion right, except by carefully moving work over to SimGear as Curt suggests, consulting authors along the way. My apologies if this response is out of sync, but i'm only about half way through the thread and need to get back to work work. Best, Jim _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
