Re: [reSIProcate] copyright over reSIProcate...
On 14/05/12 15:23, Scott Godin wrote:
> There has been plenty of talk in the past about moving to a BSD-3
> clause so that we can be GPL compatible and use a more standard
> software license than Vovida. From what I remember the Vovida license
> had some compatibility issues with GPL (it's likely due to the 4th
> clause). I believe what was previously discussed was that every
> committer/author would need to be contacted and give their permission
> to switch the license blocks - and no one has taken this on yet. I
> believe that dropping the 4th clause of the Vovida block would equate
> to the same thing. I'm not sure how many companies would
> be involved in this permission gathering work as well (ie. Purplecomm,
> Jasomi, CounterPath, etc...). I've been contributing new project
> code under the new BSD 3-clause, in anticipation we might eventually
> get the entire project move to BSD 3-clause. I know many of the
> original authors would support this.
>
If at all possible, it would be good for the project to have it done
sooner rather than later... the more time that passes, the harder it
would be to track down people who can consent on behalf of themselves
and/or their companies.
However, this is not a blocking issue for packaging, some of it is just
a convenience issue.
The initial discussion I had with the Debian community suggests that
a) the clause may be GPL compatible
b) GPL compatibility is only an issue if we also distributed GPL code
that needs to link to resiprocate (e.g. if something under apps was GPL,
then binary packages couldn't be distributed for that item)
OpenSSL has issues too of course, because of the advertising clause in
their license, and that will always be a bigger factor for any
distributing binary code involve resiprocate + TLS
> I'm OK with the generalization of 'author' in clause 3 for any work's
> I've committed, and I can't see anyone disagreeing to this.
>
> I have no interest in moving to a GPL license.
Just to be clear, that is not a requirement at all for any of the stuff
I'm doing - if a majority of developers with GPL preferences did become
interested in the project in future, they can always create a fork to go
down that path
However, as a bare minimum, I want to give proper credit to all
contributors - so if you can help me expand on the list we currently
have, that would be good. Maybe I will start a wiki page for this or an
AUTHORS file in the root of the project tree.