RE: [Bodington-developers] Bodington licence

[Adam M. <ada...@co...>]

My understanding of the Bod licence (based on hearsay and chats with his
Jonness) is that everybody gives copyright of their code to Leeds Uni and
then Leeds commit to making the code available to all to use. Doesn't that
mean that as Leeds own copyright, then can do what they like with the
licence?

Adam

--
Adam Marshall:       OUCS, 13, Banbury Rd. Oxford OX2 6NN.
Shameless plug:      Use the Bodington VLE http://bodington.org
Blog:                http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/blog/adamm/
Cheese of the month: Cheshire (not to be underestimated) 

| -----Original Message-----
| From: bod...@li... [mailto:bodington-
| dev...@li...] On Behalf Of Peter Crowther
| Sent: 26 May 2005 17:54
| To: bod...@li...; David Gardner
| Subject: RE: [Bodington-developers] Bodington licence
| 
| > From: Adam Marshall
| > Once a decision has been made, doing the actual change-over
| > 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
| 
| 
| -------------------------------------------------------
| This SF.Net email is sponsored by Yahoo.
| Introducing Yahoo! Search Developer Network - Create apps using Yahoo!
| Search APIs Find out how you can build Yahoo! directly into your own
| Applications - visit http://developer.yahoo.net/?fr=fad-ysdn-ostg-q22005
| _______________________________________________
| Bodington-developers mailing list
| Bod...@li...
| https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bodington-developers