RE: [Freeglut-developer] As an eerie silence descends ...

[Bernhard K. <ber...@gm...>]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Fay John F Contr AAC/WMG wrote:

> OK, I see three options:
>
> (1) The writer of the file keeps his copyright.  I disapprove of this (and
> so, I think, does Steve) because it makes life extremely difficult in the
> long term when people leave the project.

If we don't want to change the licence in the future, I see no problem with
this, however if we want to do in the future, we should take care that we
can reach all the copyright holders.

> (2) We all give our copyrights to Steve.  I did this on another project
> (PUI/PLIB) and have never regretted it.  Of course, it will require Steve's
> willingness to receive them.
>
> (3) We all give our copyrights to Pawel.  This is similar to (2) but with
> the disadvantage that Pawel isn't in charge of the project any more.  In
> fact, he may have already given his copyrights to Steve and we would need to
> modify all the existing copyright statements.

I think there is no requirement to make freeglut owned by a single person,
especially not if we don't intend to change the license for future versions.

In theory, would prefer to have multible copyright holders for most open
source projects.

I can't talk from a copyright holders perspective for freeglut my little
bugfix likely does not qualify for copyright, more for minor bug-fix
contribution, so at I have no stake in this discussion.

BTW, as I read the license, wouldn't it be good to have a license which
requires to license the source code of freeglut back to the project if
somebody uses it and improves it?

I personally like the LGPL for free libraries, be cause I've more more
excited by "free software"(e.g. Linux Kernel) than a just by
"open source"(e.g. BSD, X11), but it depends if we want to allow
closed source commercialisation of freeglut in the future or not.

But this depends all not the copyright holders, not on my, it's only
my general open source vs. free software view and I like open source,
but at least personally, I like free software even more.

Bernhard