[Geotools-admin] GeoTK licence change to Apache

[Seven (a. Arnulf) <se...@ar...>]

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