Copyright assignment (to some trusted foundation or whatever) solves this problem. You don't have that, you stick.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Bohlen Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 4:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [nhibernate-development] LGPL v3 for NH3 (?) 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]<mailto:[email protected]> http://blog.unhandled-exceptions.com http://twitter.com/sbohlen On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Ayende Rahien <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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<http://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 ;-)
