I agree. No copyright assignment is best, because it is a very polarizing topic in the open source community. I seem to be the only one on this list who's very vocal against it, but larger issues like the annoying required paperwork to actually achieve copyright assignment, or that virtually no open source project's even use copyright assignment are also at work. Quite a few open source projects use CLAs, but only the FSF seems to use full blown copyright assignment successfully, and they have extra staff to handle the added paperwork.
I'm glad you decided to tread carefully here, because a confusing legal situation with a open source project's license might also keep interested users and contributors away. Switching to MIT should be possible due to both projects having few big contributors, and rewritting a few smaller contributors' odd documentation fixes here or there shouldn't be too big a job. The biggest hurdle might be small patches from others that you yourself as the project leader have added to git under your own name. I don't know if any such patches exist, but that's a possible headache with switching licenses. It might also be possible to choose to ignore the small patches, and just be sure all the big pieces are in order, but proper accounting of all patches getting relicensed to MIT would provide better piece of mind especially for those who absolutely must avoid GPL code. On Sun, 25 Jan 2015 18:28:53 -0800 Jeffrey Kegler <[email protected]> wrote: > Given things have proved more complex than I anticipated, I want to > separate out the issue of assignment of copyright, to change what I > propose, and to start the discussion over. (Though of course we'll all > have the old one in mind.) > > I propose to have *no* assignment of copyright for any of my repos. From > the previous discussion, this seems to be the trend in the open source > community, and the position most likely to attract contributors and users. > > With Marpa::R2 and Libmarpa, this means keeping the status quo. No change. > > In the Kollos distribution, I had started it with an assignment of > copyright line in the README. I propose to remove this, so that all of my > repos are consistent: none of them will require, request, or accept, > assignments of copyright. > > (I now see that I should have announced the assignment of copyright clause > that I was adding to the Kollos repo. In mitigation of this mistake, I'd > point out that it's had no significant contributions but mine, and that at > the time I thought that move was unproblematic.) > > You'll notice that I'm being very careful in these IP matters. I think > they deserve it, not least because they set a tone within the Marpa > community. And, of course, the largest downside of not having copyright > assignment, is that it becomes very hard to undo any mistakes. > > I hope from this fresh start, the question of copyright assignment will > come to a quick consensus. Once this issue is settled, I will re-raise the > issue of re-licensing under the MIT/Lua license. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "marpa parser" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
