Dear all,
Summary: The pmacct project is looking to relicense its code from the
current GPL license to a more liberal BSD-style license.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to spend some face time with Paolo,
which allowed for in-depth discussion about pmacct's current trajectory
and bright future. We concluded it would be in the best interest of the
pmacct project to attempt to relicense all code under a more permissive
BSD-style license, for mainly two reasons:
1) Faced with our own mortality, it became clear that succession
planning is of paramount importance for this project's continued
success. We contemplated what happens in context of intellectual
property rights should one of pmacct's contributors pass away, and
realized potential heirs won't necessarily desire involvement in this
open source project, potentially hampering changes to intellectual
property policies in the project's future.
2) We suspect there are entities who violate the terms of pmacct's
current GPL license, but at the same time we don't wish to litigate.
Instead of getting infringers to change their behavior, relicensing
the project could be another way to resolve the potential for
conflict: we see benefits to removing rules we don't plan on
enforcing anyway.
Going forward, the preferred license under which we encourge people to
contribute new work is a variant of the ISC license (also used by the
OpenBSD project). The license template (to be used in file headers) can
be found here:
https://github.com/pmacct/pmacct/blob/master/LICENSE.template
We need explicit approval from all contributors, and carefully keep
track of those agreements. If a contributor doesn't agree or answer,
we'll have to re-implement the contributed functionality or remove the
contribution from the code base.
REQUEST TO THE PMACCT CONTRIBUTOR COMMUNITY
-------------------------------------------
If you have contributed to the pmacct project (your name may be listed
below), please consider a reply-all to this email expressing your
explicit consent (or disapproval) to change the license governing your
contributions to the pmacct project, to the following license:
"""
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for
any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the
above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all
copies.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL
WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA
OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
"""
-------------------------------------------
The next action in this process will be to individually follow up with
all contributors who didn't respond to the above request.
Once the relicensing effort has been completed, we'll tag the resulting
code base as pmacct version 2.0.0 and celebrate! Pmacct has many great
years ahead of itself; Paolo's enthusiasm to do so is evident in this
interview video :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqmOcMAtGDM
Please feel free to raise any questions you may have on the
[email protected] list, or privately with me and/or Paolo.
Kind regards,
Job Snijders
DRAFT LIST OF KNOWN PMACCT AUTHORS (based on 'git shortlog -sen')
=================================================================
Commits Author <email>
2921 Paolo Lucente <[email protected]>
52 Marc Sune <[email protected]>
20 Corentin Néau <[email protected]>
17 Vincent Bernat <[email protected]>
14 Job Snijders <[email protected]>
12 Matthias Arnold <[email protected]>
9 Raphaël P. Barazzutti <[email protected]>
9 Claudio Ortega <[email protected]>
8 Jonas Jensen <[email protected]>
8 Matthias Arnold <[email protected]>
8 Tim LaBerge <[email protected]>
7 Jared Mauch <[email protected]>
7 vittoriofoschi <[email protected]>
7 Camilo Cardona <[email protected]>
5 Aaron Finney <[email protected]>
5 Vittorio Foschi <[email protected]>
4 vphatarp <[email protected]>
3 Alexander Brusilov <[email protected]>
3 Emil Palm <[email protected]>
3 Dusan Migra <[email protected]>
3 Dan Berger <[email protected]>
3 Markus Weber <[email protected]>
2 Tim LaBerge <[email protected]>
2 Guy Lowe <[email protected]>
2 Hidde van der Heide <[email protected]>
2 Jim Westfall <[email protected]>
2 Lee Yongjae <[email protected]>
2 Lennert Buytenhek <[email protected]>
2 Matthieu Texier <[email protected]>
2 Miki Takata <[email protected]>
2 Pierre Dubouilh <[email protected]>
2 Tiago Gomes <[email protected]>
2 Vadim Tk <[email protected]>
3 Thomas Graf <[email protected]>
1 Junpei YOSHINO <[email protected]>
1 root <[email protected]>
1 Mehul Prajapati <[email protected]>
1 Mike Jager <[email protected]>
1 rouba002 <[email protected]>
1 Nimrod <[email protected]>
1 Jeroen Roovers <[email protected]>
1 Paweł Małachowski <[email protected]>
1 Pier Carlo Chiodi <[email protected]>
1 rsolsn <[email protected]>
1 Ivan F. Martinez <[email protected]>
1 Raymond Russell <[email protected]>
1 Rico29 <[email protected]>
1 Robert Wuttke <[email protected]>
1 Seth N. Hetu <[email protected]>
1 Arnold Matthias <[email protected]>
1 Guo-Wei Su <[email protected]>
1 Elisa Jasinska <[email protected]>
1 Alexandros Couloumbis <[email protected]>
1 Davíð Steinn Geirsson <[email protected]>
1 David Higgs <[email protected]>
1 Vyron Tsingaras <[email protected]>
1 cozonac <[email protected]>
1 Александр Шалаев <[email protected]>
1 matthewsf <[email protected]>
1 Manuel Mendez <[email protected]>
1 Marc Sune <[email protected]>
1 Kunshchikov Vladimir <[email protected]>
1 Marcos Marado <[email protected]>
1 Jonas Gröger <[email protected]>
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