Hello, Another status update: we have reached 65% of permissions from the people we contacted. We are still experiencing some delays in reaching a few individuals, but I am confident that more replies will arrive soon. I have also recently added a couple more names to the list of people with library copyright claims. As promised, we are providing more details on the process that determined this list.
As you know, until 2022 PoDoFo was a Subversion-based project, and public contributions from people without write access to the SF.net repository were submitted through the mailing list as patches. A manual review of all commits has been carried out to collect all contributors, resulting in a total of around 100 individual contributors up to December 2022 (after that date, we require all contributions to be licensed under LGPLv2+/MPL-2.0). Major contributors and maintainers were easily identified. For the remaining cases, criteria were defined to identify people with potential copyright claims. We took inspiration from successful re-licensing efforts such as VLC (GPLv2 -> LGPLv2.1+) and similar projects. The defined criteria are (either one is sufficient): - Enough "lines of code" for the single patch, with most of them still in place and recognizable (i.e., not substantially rewritten by contributors already supporting the dual licensing). In most cases, the observed cutoff is around ~10 lines, although qualitative considerations have also been applied; - A sufficient number of submitted patches. In practice, the observed cutoff is 10 patches, again with additional qualitative considerations where appropriate. By "lines of code" we mean methodic/algorithmic LOC: non-empty, non-delimiting (e.g., block braces), excluding build configuration files and, in most cases, headers and comments. Contributions not meeting these criteria are considered small patches or collections of small patches. Since we are prioritizing the dual licensing of the library, the following have not been taken significantly into account (for now): tests, tools, man pages, and CMakeLists.txt files (which have since been heavily rewritten). The application of the above criteria resulted in the following contributions not requiring explicit consent for the dual licensing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o6XRJowO_6nBnYZcgqu6YYp_UNS9x2qzYGUSMna6BXU/edit?usp=sharing?gid=1925947523#gid=1925947523 The remaining 20 individuals are those we are currently contacting regarding **library-only** copyright claims: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o6XRJowO_6nBnYZcgqu6YYp_UNS9x2qzYGUSMna6BXU/edit?usp=sharing Overall, the results show a tendency in arbitrating between casual (or near-casual) contributions and more substantial ones. In particular, the "sufficient patches" criterion helps recognize the work of contributors who may not have provided major implementations but invested significant time in making the project broadly usable. Please feel free to raise any doubts or concerns regarding the methodology used. Kind regards, Francesco On Sat, 7 Feb 2026 at 01:39, Francesco Pretto <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello PoDoFo users, > > I think it's time already for a quick update on the status of the dual > licensing operation. Here is the list of people (most likely) holding > some copyrights on the library code: > > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o6XRJowO_6nBnYZcgqu6YYp_UNS9x2qzYGUSMna6BXU/edit?usp=sharing >
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