RE: [Bodington-developers] Bodington licence

[Peter C. <Pet...@me...>]

> From: Adam Marshall=20
> Once a decision has been made, doing the actual change-over=20
> is a relatively
> trivial exercise. We just need the go ahead.

It ain't quite that easy.  There is no clause in the license to state
that you may change the license.  The contributors to Bodington have
contributed under the existing license.  If you want to change it - and
for the change to be watertight, i.e. so that an irritated past
contributor cannot sue you or another organisation for using their code
without license - you need to track down everyone who's ever contributed
to the Bodington codebase and get their written consent to the change.

This is exactly why the GPL has the clause in it about later versions of
the GPL itself.

For the record: Melandra Limited has not contributed any code directly
to the Bodington codebase, with the possible exception of the content
packaging contributions that came in earlier this afternoon and whose
status is not yet clear [Sean?].  All other contributions have been made
via IP assignment agreements with third parties.  As we have not seen
the detail of the proposed revised license, we cannot state for certain
that we would be willing to license any contributions to Bodington under
such a changed license.  If the new license is at least as open as the
current one, however, we would not expect to withold consent.

Sorry to appear a bit retentive about this, but if you're expecting
public bodies to use this codebase for their institutional VLE then you
really do want a squeaky-clean IP story.

		- Peter