The possible need for re-licensing under a different open source license is one the biggest reasons I am generally an advocate for CLAs (with an appropriate community-based governance organization like the ASF). I find the cautionary tale of the Mozilla Relicensing Effort [1] illuminating -- it took 4.5 years to track down 445 contributors and get appropriate permission so that Firefox/Thunderbird/etc could be directly included into Linux distros. All of which could have been avoided with an Apache-style CLA in place.
[1] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html [2] http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/ On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:02 PM, David Woolley <for...@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote: > > > One of the uses of CLA's is to allow the software to be re-licensed under > a different open source licence. This can prove highly desirable, but > almost impossible, if there are large numbers of contributions under the > old licence. It might be needed because it has become important to > integrate the work with work under and otherwise incompatible open source > licence. In the past, I think it has been necessary to remove > contributions from a minor contributor, to achieve this, because they were > unable or unwilling to licence it under the new licence. (Something similar > happened with OpenStreetmap's map database; some geographical features had > to be removed because the project was unable to get permission to use it > under a new, less restrictive, licence.) > > >
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