Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses [LWN.net]

Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Posted Sep 1, 2012 5:05 UTC (Sat) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143)
In reply to: Still under HP's full control by tzafrir
Parent article: Open webOS beta release

"I understand that I retain copyright ownership in this contribution and I am granting the project a copyright license to use, modify and distribute my contribution. The project may relicense my contribution under other OSI-approved licenses."

"In some cases the project may need to relicense your contribution under other OSI-approved open source licenses in order to maintain the Apache-based licensing. For example, if your contribution is affected by GPL v2 code, the project may dual-license your code under both Apache 2.0 and GPL v2 or LGPLv2.1. This satisfies the GPL requirements, while still allowing other users to make use of the code under Apache."

This seems totally reasonable to me. Note that BSD-style licenses are *not* OSI approved. Having a relatively unbiased 3rd party organization determine acceptable license choices seems like a reasonable approach.
The alternative of trying to keep track of every contributor so that permission can be asked when needed... seems like an administrative nightmare. I know some projects have done that, but I'd rather allow OSI to by my proxy in approving licenses than cause somebody to burn so much time on getting consensus of every individual contributor.

(Log in to post comments)

Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Posted Sep 1, 2012 8:23 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Let me explain you what's wrong IMHO:

#Include <ianal.h>

Suppose you wrote a nice little kernel driver, an extra feature to the Linux plumbing or whatever and you add a commit comment to your code:

Signed-off-by: First Last <email@example.org>

See http://www.elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin

This basically mean: "yes, I'm allowed to commit those changes to this repository".

WebOS / HP went on and slightly changed clause (d) in order to create its own variant. So if you happen to write:

Open-webOS-DCO-1.0-Signed-off-by: First Last <email@example.org>

you not only declare a certificate or origin, you also grant a specific commercial entity (HP. Not any WebOS non-profit) the right to do whatever it wanted with your code.

I hope this indicates stupidity.

Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Posted Sep 1, 2012 9:48 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

>Note that BSD-style licenses are *not* OSI approved.

Oh seriously come on. http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause

Relicensing would use other OSI-approved licenses

Posted Sep 1, 2012 19:21 UTC (Sat) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

Not to mention:
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause
and
http://opensource.org/licenses/ISC (which I think of as BSD-descended).