Re: [Geotools-devel] Asking permission to re-license portions of GeoTools 2.6 (2008) from LGPL to Apache

[Martin D. <mar...@ge...>]

Hello all

Two weeks ago, we posted a request to the GeoTools PMC asking permission 
to re-license portions of GeoTools 2.6. However since that time, we 
reformulated our demand as a request to the OSGeo board to state 
whatever the Contributor's rights, which is granted "perpetual, 
irrevocable, worldwide, royalty­free, license to use, copy, prepare 
derivative works of, publicly display or perform, and distribute the 
Submission", include the right to re-license his own code. Adrian 
Custer, who wrote the Copyright Assignment together with a Lawyer, 
confirmed us very clearly that the intend was to give unrestricted 
rights to the contributor over his own code, including re-licensing, 
providing that all other contributions are removed. This is also the 
right of those who signed the Contributor Agreement instead than the 
Copyright Assignment.

The OSGeo board is expected to take a decision in their meeting 
scheduled August 9. If the OSGeo vote is positive, then we would like to 
withdrawn our request to the GeoTools PMC. We decided to re-license only 
the code that we wrote, with all other contributions omitted or rolled 
back. Of course the procedure can continue if the GeoTools community 
still wants to examine the question, but it could be driven as a 
procedure independent of our current request.

     Regards,

         Martin