[reSIProcate] copyright over reSIProcate...

[Scott Godin]

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.

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.

Scott

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au> wrote:

>
>
>
> For the Debian package, and likely for other purposes, it is important
> to do an audit of the copyright contributions and respective license terms
>
> I've had a go at this - but I'd really like to make sure I haven't
> missed anyone, so please speak up if I have.
>
> It appears that the VOCAL license is really just the BSD license with:
>
> - the University name replaced with Vovida
> - an extra clause (4) reinforcing the restriction on use of the name
> Vovida/VOCAL
>
> Other contributors (myself, SIP Spectrum, Plantronics and possibly
> others) appear to have granted identical license terms except:
>
> - using their own names within the place of Vovida
> - not always adding the fourth clause (which appears to just restate the
> third clause of the BSD license anyway)
>
> This brings me to raise a few queries:
>
> a) could we generalise the license text, while retaining individual
> copyright?  E.g.:
>
>   Copyright (c) 2012 <YOUR NAME HERE>
>    ...
>      3. Neither the name of the author nor the names of contributors
>      may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
>      without specific prior written permission.
>
> Notice it says `the author' rather than repeating the author's name from
> the copyright at the top.  Although this change is trivial, if we don't
> do it, we technically have different licenses for different source files.
>
> b) can we drop clause (4) from the Vovida license?
>
> c) what is the status of Vovida anyway?  Is this company still
> registered, did the copyright become the property of the new owners of
> the company, for example, and should the copyright notices be updated?
>
> d) Has there been any discussion about granting the rights to some
> non-profit association, rather than having bits of code each copyrighted
> by individual contributors?  I'm not necessarily advocating this
> approach, but some projects have gone that way.
>
> e) do any active contributors feel they would prefer to put their future
> contributions under GPL2 or GPL3 terms?  This does not in any way
> undermine the rights of previous contributors or existing users of the
> previous releases of the stack.  It would mean that anyone using a
> future release of the stack would be obliged to open source any code
> they write linking to the stack.
>
> Here is a link to the copyright summary for Debian:
>
>
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/resiprocate.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/copyright;hb=HEAD
>
>
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>
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