Follow-up Comment #4, task #10626 (project administration): Hi Alex,
In no way I wanted to suggest that you have been too slow or anything with my comment, it was more that I had hoped that all contributors to ESPResSo (including me) had worked such that submitting it to Savannah would work "out of the box". Well, we didn't. To be able to go on with adapting ESPResSo to meet Savannah's requirements, I would like to ask a few things. The problem is that we are scientists, and all that legal stuff is pretty alien to us. We are willing to do it right, but we might need some help. I have tried to find answers to my questions at different places (e.g. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html), but I got lost in the legal jungle and didn't find what I was looking for. We still know all contributors, and we can reconstruct who has done what on each file, as we have been using a VCS from the very start. However, not all of the contributors can be easily contacted. One of them has actually died, others are also pretty much out of our scope. We (i.e. the ESPResSo core team) now think that it would be nice to change the license of ESPResSo to pure GPL instead of the modified version from LICENSE.TXT. Is there a way to do this legally? I gather that it would be no problem if all contributors agree, and I'm pretty sure that none of the contributors would disagree. However, we will not be able to ask all of them. Is this a problem? So far, the various files do not have copyright notices that specify individual copyright owners. Instead, the copyright owner for that time seem to be the "Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Theory Group". Of course we have to retain this copyright notice in the future. As far as I understand, as the program was developed under the GPL (or the slightly modified version) right from the start, this can not cause any problem, even if the MPI would start to claim its copyright at some stage, right? Or would it be better to get an explicit copyright disclaimer from the institute? The institute fully agrees, so it shouldn't be a problem. Finally I wonder what is the best thing to put into the copyright header in the future. Does it really make sense that everybody who makes any modification to any of the files adds himself to the copyright claim in the top? Or can we put in the FSF or FSFE as copyright holder and like that transfer the copyright? Or should we use something like "The ESPResSo team"? I hope that you can help to make these things clearer to me, or maybe pass my questions on. Or should I directly pose these questions to [email protected]? Best regards Olaf _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?10626> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/
