Simon Wilkinson wrote: > In my opinion, the issues arrive if the contributor license is > structured to allow the Foundation to perform any kind of relicensing. > This requires contributors to place a significant level of trust in the > Foundation, now and in the future, to only relicense code in a manner > which is acceptable to the community. In particular, there is the danger > that the Foundation could sell code which has been contributed to it in > this way to commercial third parties, without the permission of the > original contributors. I'm sure nobody involved in the Foundation has > any intention of this at present, but it is a concern for the future. > > So, any contribution agreement that requires assignment of copyright, or > which grants the Foundation additional permissions over and above the > license that the contribution is provided under, would have to be very > carefully considered. I feel that even a well structured agreement along > these lines might deter prospective contributors, who either want to > retain the ability to determine how their code may be used, or whose > employers aren't prepared to grant extensive relicensing permissions to > a third party.
Given that we can't relicense the IBM contribution, unless the entire code base was re-written from scratch it would be nearly impossible for the Foundation to re-license anything within the core. Since copyright assignment is not legal in Europe that is out of scope as well. What we are looking for is a statement that says "I am the author of this contribution and I have full rights to publish this contribution under the following license(s) such that the OpenAFS Foundation may incorporate it into the source repository and redistribute it in source and binary forms under the terms of the selected licenses." Such a contributor license could also apply to contributions to the wiki, the archive of this mailing list, etc. Contributions do not necessary have to be source code. Derrick's suggestion is that individuals who are members of the Foundation provide such designation up front as opposed to being asked to provide such a statement with each contribution. Jeffrey Altman
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