Okay, done. I've emailed existing authors that I've received patches from and received their okay to release Osmosis into the Public Domain. I should note that Public Domain is not the first choice of several responders, and there are some concerns about Public Domain in some jurisdictions. However these objections are only concerns with the legal aspects of the change and not the intent of the change.
I've just checked in a bunch of changes that do the following: * Remove the copyright header from all source files and replace it with "// This software is released into the Public Domain. See copying.txt for details." * Updated copying.txt to say that osmosis is Public Domain or nearest equivalent and adds a warranty and liability disclaimer. See here for more details. http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/osmosis/trunk/copying.txt * Deleted the existing gpl.txt. So, this may not be a perfect solution but nothing will be. I don't want to spend much more time on the issue, but I'm happy if others are. At this point Osmosis is Public Domain (interpret that as you will) and nobody is claiming any right over the software so you can do what you please. This includes taking a copy and placing it straight back under the GPL. Of course if you do this you'll have forked the project and I'll continue my hippie existence in Public Domain land ;-) There have been other suggestions to use a licence such as the WTFPL (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/). That may be appropriate and I wouldn't be utterly opposed to it. But as I said above, I don't want to spend much more time on this problem but if others do then feel free to jump in and do something. At this point I'm also tempted to remove my name from all source files but that's harder and I'm lazy. I'll stop adding it to new files and won't be upset if others delete my name from existing files. Brett Brett Henderson wrote: > I hate to bring this topic up because I don't know if I have the > necessary patience for it :-) > > Osmosis is currently GPL3. At one point I was going to use GPL2 or > later but the use of the Apache bzip2 implementation precludes that. > > The number of authors is fairly low at the moment so there is still a > chance to change the licence. > > At this point I'm wishing I'd just released it as public domain in the > first place. I don't intend to make money from it, I don't care what > people do with it, and the recent discussions on legal-talk have > convinced me that any gains that a copyleft licence might achieve are > dwarfed by the problems that licence compatibility causes. The use of > bzip2 libraries has already forced my hand in one direction, and it's > likely to only get worse. Osmosis is a piece of plumbing that is most > useful if it can be used anywhere. > > My motivation for creating osmosis in the first place was simply that > my day job no longer had a technical component and I wanted a hobby > software project to tinker with. It quickly grew into a bigger time > sink than I originally planned but my reasons for involvement are > still that it is a hobby. I get more satisfaction out of seeing > people using something I've built than I do out of any recognition for > being the author. At this point my time is becoming more limited so I > see my role becoming less central but I'd like to make sure that > everything including the licence status is robust before I drop anything. > > So, what are people's thoughts? There are approximately half a dozen > contributors so far who I can mail separately if required (or name > them on this list, not sure what the etiquette is here). With one > exception (initial 0.6 support) most patches have been fairly self > contained and could be replaceable if required. If there's no major > arguments I'll send the existing authors an email over the next few > days asking permission to release all software as public domain. If > that goes smoothly then the existing licence text can be removed and > replaced with a public domain dedication statement of some kind. > > Brett > > _______________________________________________ osmosis-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmosis-dev
