Adam Jackson wrote: > In light of the recent GLX relicensing, it was brought up to the board > that our contribution policy is not really explicitly written down > anywhere. The following is a licensing policy draft that's hopefully > pretty uncontentious. Eventually this (or something like it) will go up > on the wiki, and patches from casual contributors should be accepted > with a note to the contributor of what they're agreeing to (and new > developers should be pointed at it when getting their commit bit). > > Note that this isn't a _change_ in policy so much as an attempt to > capture what we already intend. If you think this is a good opportunity > to lobby for a switch to GPL or CDDL or WTFPL or whatever, that's nice > and all, but please don't. > > I don't know what our documentation licensing stance is. MIT would keep > things simple, but I don't know if it's appropriate for docs.
I'm in favour of keeping the MIT license for docs too, for the sake of simplicity. > > At any rate, feedback greatly appreciated. > > --- > > The X.Org Foundation is dedicated to improving the open source reference > implementation of the X Window System for the benefit of all. To this > end, code and documentation contributions are required to be under a > suitably permissive license. The preferred code license is the MIT > license; the canonical form of the MIT license is here: [ insert link to > version with generic "THE AUTHORS" rather than explicit author names ]. > > [ XXX doc license? ] > > For small changes, including patches sent through a bug tracker or > mailing list, changes are assumed to be under the MIT license. If you > do not agree to this, please refrain from sending us such patches in the > first place, and ask to have your changes reverted if necessary. > > For contributions of new code and large subsystems, the code must be > annotated with a copy of the MIT license (or a reference to same). > Contributions under licenses other than MIT will be considered on a case > by case basis, but in general are very unlikely to be accepted. > > Foundation developers are defined as those people with commit access to > the Foundation repositories. In applying for (and accepting) developer > status, you implicitly agree to these license policy terms for the > Foundation works themselves. Note that your right to create derived > works under different licenses is not restricted, they just won't be > formal Foundation projects. > > For all changes, you as contributor warrant that you have the right to > contribute the code in question under the license terms described here. > > For its part, the Foundation will work to maintain permissive grant of > rights for all code and documentation in its projects. In the event > that the Foundation decides to change licensing on one or more files, > permission will only be sought from copyright holders as listed in the > explicit Copyright statements at the top of the appropriate files. > Casual contributions without assertions of copyright will not be > interpreted as an assignment or relinquishing of copyright, but will be > interpreted as a waiver of interest in the precise license terms. > > Note that under the terms of the MIT license, you effectively already > waive your right to prevent use of your work under more restrictive > terms (for example, under the GPLv2), and that it's quite difficult to > come up with a more permissive license than MIT. The waiver in the > previous paragraph is really only for the case that we somehow discover > that, for example, a file was really under the Apache license and we > needed to relicense it to maintain MIT-ness, or that some clause of MIT > becomes unpleasantly restrictive in some jurisdiction. > Sounds good. -- Matthieu Herrb _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg