Re: [Geotools-admin] GeoTK licence change to Apache

[Justin D. <jde...@op...>]

Thanks Arnulf, that all makes sense. But I am curious as to how Martin
intends to come up with the exact lines of code he wrote. He has thrown out
the 95% figure and i am curious as to how he is calculating that. Is he
counting all classes in which there is an author tag with his name on it?
What about the classes with multiple authors, or the classes to which
others have contributed code to? Are they still his?

Martin was also notorious for reformatting other peoples code so in many
case svn history will show him as the author when it was not actually the
case. I know this personally because i have contributed classes to "his"
modules before and had this happen. And certainly when I wrote that code i
wasn't intending to give ownership to martin, but to the geotools project
so as owner is the onus on myself to ensure my code is not re-licensed?
Seems like pretty murky territory.

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Seven (aka Arnulf) <se...@ar...> wrote:

> Folks,
> from your discussion on this mailing lists I gather that you have a
> vetted interest in how the OSGeo Board moves this forward.
>
> I concur with Frank and Ben that the OSGeo contributor agreement already
> grants Martin the right to do whatever he likes with his own submissions:
>
> "The Foundation hereby grants the Contributor the non­exclusive,
> perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty­-free, license to use, copy,
> prepare derivative works of, publicly display or perform, and distribute
> the Submission."
>
> This is the only thing he is asking for right now, so we are in the clear.
>
>
> But due diligence on OSGeo's side asks for making sure that the process
> does not harm any of the parties involved. Therefore I will try to
> sketch some of my thoughts so that you know where I come from and in the
> hope that you can correct my thinking if it went wrong anywhere.
>
>
> The fork of the projects was a long and somewhat painful process for all
> involved but in the end seemed to be the only way forward.
>
> I am personally inclined to allow any project in OSGeo to choose
> whatever Open Source license they want to - at more or less any time. I
> am also a friend of dual or multiple licensing, given it is all FOSS
> licenses. I am absolutely opposed to any kind of dual licensing when it
> involves so called "commercial" licenses because they can by nature only
> be broken.
>
> That said I will vote +1 for the proposed GeoTK relicensing, provided it
> only includes code created by Martin (and any other individual willing
> to follow along). Any code that was submitted in the faith that it will
> stay under LGPL *before* the copyright assignment to OSGeo became
> efective cannot be relicensed without the consent of the original creator.
>
> So far I have not really found good arguments against proceeding like
> this. If you have substantial arguments against doing this please let me
> know. For me "substantial" in this context means either heavily damaging
> to either project or their corresponding developer and user communities.
>
> Whether or not code has been licensed as GPL and then LGPL before or
> after Martin joined and how much code he wrote and whether the fork will
> be all rewritten or not is beyond my capacities to find out on my own.
> This is a problem. I (and probably the rest of the board too) will have
> to trust both parties on this part. I will challenge both to be
> benevolent and not stingy in their estimates and opinions.
>
> I can see that there are concerns that a license change may have an
> effect in commercial uptake. If that is the case and GeoTools wants to
> also profit from these (in my opinion usually dubious and alledged)
> advantages), then did you ever consider dual licensing or moving to a
> more premissive version?
>
> Personally I do not believe in "aggressive" licenses. Instead I find it
> rather amusing that in this context permissive versions of FOSS licenses
> are deemed more "aggressive" than restrictive licenses. Not long ago the
> Copyleft-effect was called aggresive and "viral", interesting to see the
> perception shift. Maybe my latest blog is a related read in this context:
>
> http://arnulf.us/sevendipity/archives/50-Why-Copyleft-is-Not-a-Problem.html
>
>
> In the hope of better understanding how to best proceed,
> Arnulf
>
>
> --
> Exploring Space, Time and Mind
> http://arnulf.us
>
>
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-- 
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.