OSLib license

[Jonathan Coxhead]

   John Tytgat wrote:

> [much stuff I have no comment on]
>
> The reason why I started this topic is that I want to
> revive old and unreleased code of mine which is using OSLib and which
> probably in first instance won't be released under GPL so I started
> wondering if I could proceed with that code base as is or that I had to do
> surgery which would be a great shame IMHO.

   I sincerely hope you will conclude you need no surgery.

> Personally I think if we can cover the OSLib license intensions outlined
> above by one or more known licenses, we better do that instead of trying to
> formulate exceptions and let alone only do this in a FAQ.

   I think so. The MIT licence mentioned by Philips Ludlum
"philip at philipnet.com", also known as the X11 licence, seems OK to me. I also
think that using it would not count as a change, but only as a clarification.
This means that hopefully there would be no reason to positively vet all the
contributors for permission.

   I would propose, if the licence is changed, the following 2 steps would be
necessary and sufficient to clear all moral and legal hurdles:

   (0) Mail out on this mailing list an intention to change the license, and
address any concerns that may be raised;

   (1) In the source code and documentation, after defining the new license,
have a note to say that no licence infringement is intended, and that while
every effort has been made to communicate with all copyright holders, mistakes
may have been made. Any objections should be communicated to the maintainer, who
will correct them in future releases.

   I've seen this sort of notice in things like books of photos where provenance
may be murky, so I guess it's OK.

>> At the moment, the
>> copyright is notionally mine.
> 
> For all the code you contributed, most certainly yes.  But as long as other
> contributors didn't transfer their copyright to you for their contributions,
> they still have their copyright.  I'm not aware of a implicit or explicit
> rule in OSLib project that the copyright gets automatically transfered.

   Yes, you are quite right, I misspoke.

> When all copyright holders on OSLib agree, they can re-license OSLib under
> a different or even more than one license. I think the answer could be in
> dual or tri licensing covering the conflicting goals Jonathan outlined
> above.  I'm not aware of any authoritive source of dual/triple licensing but
> <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_license> is rather informative to
> me.  Perhaps GPL 2 + LGPL 2.1 + MPL 1.1 tri license like Mozilla/Firefox/
> Thunderbird are using ?

   Multiple licensing sounds like a complicated solution to this problem.

   What do you think of the MIT licence?

-- 
... Jonathan
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