Interesting.  As I theorized, I suppose this kind of 'boring bookkeeping'
issue is what creates so much friction that near-every OSS project is more
or less forced to stick with their initial license selection -- for better
or for worse :)

Steve Bohlen
[email protected]
http://blog.unhandled-exceptions.com
http://twitter.com/sbohlen


On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Ayende Rahien <[email protected]> wrote:

> Not really, no.
> Take a look at the Linux kernel licensing. You can't license it as anything
> but GPL 2, because some of the code *doesn't* have "or later version", so
> it is explicitly 2.0
> Now, it is a pretty fair bet that most of the people who contributed the
> code wouldn't mind, but...
>
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Wenig, Stefan <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> > To my knowledge you can't re-license code you don't own the copyright
>> > of.
>>
>> True, but the community _could_ make a decision together if they really
>> wanted.
>>
>> > Not sure if this is a problem, but I could imagine that code which is
>> > ported
>> > from Java has to inherit the same license.
>>
>> Funny, now that you mention it, Java-Hibernate doesn't specify the LGPL
>> version either!
>>
>> /*
>>  * Hibernate, Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java
>>  *
>>  * Copyright (c) 2010, Red Hat Inc. or third-party contributors as
>>  * indicated by the @author tags or express copyright attribution
>>  * statements applied by the authors.  All third-party contributions are
>>  * distributed under license by Red Hat Inc.
>>  *
>>  * This copyrighted material is made available to anyone wishing to use,
>> modify,
>>  * copy, or redistribute it subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU
>>  * Lesser General Public License, as published by the Free Software
>> Foundation.
>>  *
>>  * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
>>  * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
>> MERCHANTABILITY
>>  * or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Lesser General Public
>> License
>>  * for more details.
>>  *
>>  * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
>> License
>>  * along with this distribution; if not, write to:
>>  * Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>  * 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor
>>  * Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA
>>  */
>>
>> SVN contains lgpl.txt with v2.1, but I guess that really means nothing.
>>
>> On hibernate.org it says v2.1. Again, void.
>>
>> > What I don't understand is that they're concerned about what to provide
>> > for
>> > reverse engineering but at the same time they're developing a GPL v3
>> > application?
>>
>> I think he didn't say they're using it, just that this would be an
>> advantage. He probably guessed that nobody would care enough about only
>> pleasing his lawyers ;-)
>>
>>
>

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