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 pmacct-discussion@pmacct.net 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 <pa...@pmacct.net> 52 Marc Sune <marcde...@gmail.com> 20 Corentin Néau <corentin.n...@codethink.co.uk> 17 Vincent Bernat <vinc...@bernat.im> 14 Job Snijders <j...@instituut.net> 12 Matthias Arnold <matthias.arn...@swisscom.com> 9 Raphaël P. Barazzutti <raph...@barazzutti.net> 9 Claudio Ortega <claudio.alberto.ort...@gmail.com> 8 Jonas Jensen <jo...@semmle.com> 8 Matthias Arnold <tbear...@users.noreply.github.com> 8 Tim LaBerge <tlabe...@visi.com> 7 Jared Mauch <ja...@puck.nether.net> 7 vittoriofoschi <vittorio.fos...@gmail.com> 7 Camilo Cardona <cam...@ntt.net> 5 Aaron Finney <aaron.fin...@openx.com> 5 Vittorio Foschi <vittorio.fos...@gmail.com> 4 vphatarp <vaibhav.phatarpe...@gmail.com> 3 Alexander Brusilov <photo...@yandex.ru> 3 Emil Palm <e...@x86.nu> 3 Dusan Migra <dusan.mi...@edgeintelligence.com> 3 Dan Berger <dber...@valvesoftware.com> 3 Markus Weber <f...@uucp.de> 2 Tim LaBerge <tlabe...@cisco.com> 2 Guy Lowe <g...@gunk.gen.nz> 2 Hidde van der Heide <hvanderhe...@nexuz.net> 2 Jim Westfall <jwestf...@surrealistic.net> 2 Lee Yongjae <setu...@gmail.com> 2 Lennert Buytenhek <buyt...@wantstofly.org> 2 Matthieu Texier <matth...@texier.tv> 2 Miki Takata <mi...@nttv6.jp> 2 Pierre Dubouilh <pldubou...@gmail.com> 2 Tiago Gomes <tiago.go...@codethink.co.uk> 2 Vadim Tk <gitcom...@m.vtk.one> 3 Thomas Graf <tho...@graf3.net> 1 Junpei YOSHINO <junpei.yosh...@gmail.com> 1 root <r...@smokeping.celya.fr> 1 Mehul Prajapati <mehulprajapati2...@gmail.com> 1 Mike Jager <m...@mikej.net.nz> 1 rouba002 <rouba...@gmail.com> 1 Nimrod <nimr...@gmail.com> 1 Jeroen Roovers <j...@gentoo.org> 1 Paweł Małachowski <pawel.malachow...@atendesoftware.pl> 1 Pier Carlo Chiodi <pie...@pierky.com> 1 rsolsn <3997743+rso...@users.noreply.github.com> 1 Ivan F. Martinez <iva...@saisp.br> 1 Raymond Russell <raym...@corvil.com> 1 Rico29 <cedric.bassa...@gmail.com> 1 Robert Wuttke <rob...@benocs.com> 1 Seth N. Hetu <sh...@akamai.com> 1 Arnold Matthias <tbear...@daisy63.bblab.ch> 1 Guo-Wei Su <nansena...@gmail.com> 1 Elisa Jasinska <el...@jasinska.de> 1 Alexandros Couloumbis <a...@ozo.com> 1 Davíð Steinn Geirsson <d...@sensa.is> 1 David Higgs <hig...@users.noreply.github.com> 1 Vyron Tsingaras <vyro...@vtsingaras.me> 1 cozonac <radu.ang...@xindi.ro> 1 Александр Шалаев <ashal...@ivi.ru> 1 matthewsf <matusku...@gmail.com> 1 Manuel Mendez <mmendez...@gmail.com> 1 Marc Sune <m...@voltanet.io> 1 Kunshchikov Vladimir <kunshchikov....@infotecs.ru> 1 Marcos Marado <mindboosterno...@gmail.com> 1 Jonas Gröger <jo...@huntun.de> _______________________________________________ pmacct-discussion mailing list http://www.pmacct.net/#mailinglists