A little googling turns up the paper to which Joerg is referring: http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html#changing
Apparently under U.S. law, changing the license is easier than was once thought. It hinges on whether the code is considered a "joint work" or a "collective work", and on whether the copyright owners have registered copyrights or not, and whether or not there is a monetary harm caused to them by the change. I, like others in this forum, have always thought it required unanimous agreement. On 06/07/10 02:15, Erik Trimble wrote: > Frankly, this is one of the biggest arguments in favor of assigning > copyright to some single entity for all contributions to a project. > It's what allows multi-licensing of an entire codebase. IHNSHO, > anyone running a large OpenSource project should /always/ insist on > copyright assignment. *Who* that copyright is assigned to is another > matter entirely, but it should always happen. Otherwise, you're stuck. > > The FSF does it, the Apache Foundation, Mozilla project, and > OpenSolaris, not to mention the OpenJDK project. > > -Erik > > > > > On 6/6/2010 10:55 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote: >> Andrew Greimann wrote: >> >>> Out of curiousity, is it possible to convert the GPL-licensed GNOME >>> on OpenSolaris to the CDDL or MIT licenses? >>> >> You would have to get every person& corporation owning copyright in >> every GNOME >> module to agree to that, the odds of which are staggeringly high >> against you, >> especially as there would be no arguable benefit to it. >> >> >>> Or, can someone install the Fluxbox environment onto OpenSolaris? >>> >> Sure, download the source and build it. Or check the usual >> packaging sites to >> see if someone has already done that and decided to share it. >> >> > > -- blu It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Oracle Corporation. Ph:603-262-3916, Em:[email protected] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
