Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 15:05 UTC (Thu) by krake (guest, #55996)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by wolftune
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

> *or* it can be merged back by simply at the time of merging ask the copyright holder to release the relevant code under the permissive license.

That is of course also true for any code in a proprietary fork.
Relicensing always requires the consent of the copyright holder.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 18:26 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (10 responses)

Intrigued by your use of the singular. Do many (non-FSF of course) GPLv3 projects have a single copyright holder?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 19:19 UTC (Thu) by emunson (subscriber, #44357) [Link] (5 responses)

I am sure lots of small ones do, as well as any that require copyright assignment.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 20:04 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (4 responses)

Of course. But is that a lot? That doesn't describe any of the GPLv3 projects that I use so, in my experience, it's a vanishingly small number. But my experience is definitely not statistically relevant.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 14:41 UTC (Fri) by emunson (subscriber, #44357) [Link] (3 responses)

IIRC (please correct these if they are wrong) all GNU projects require copyright assignment. Canonical either used to or talked about it, but they don't seem to anymore. I vaguely remember Sun requiring it, but I am less sure there than I am about Canonical.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 15:03 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Not all GNU projects, actually. GNOME (including glib, GTK+, etc.) is probably the biggest example of a GNU project that doesn't require copyright assignment.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 16:41 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You're right, which is why I said: "non-FSF of course"

Speaking as one who's happily assigned my copyrights to the FSF in the past.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 19, 2015 21:49 UTC (Mon) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

No, I believe today most GNU projects do not require copyright assignment. The GNU projects that do require copyright assignment are, I believe, those that make up the oldest stratum of GNU (those which were initially developed by FSF employees). Those projects are approximately the best-known GNU projects, however.

If someone from the FSF is reading, maybe they can clarify.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 7:02 UTC (Fri) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (3 responses)

> Intrigued by your use of the singular.

Thanks.
English is not my primary language, I wasn't aware that the use of the singular was in any kind special.

> Do many (non-FSF of course) GPLv3 projects have a single copyright holder?

I don't know, I guess it depends on whether that is deemed important.
Do many of the non Apache Foundation Apache2 projects have a single copyright holder?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 16:28 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

I mean, it changes the feel of your sentence. You must see the difference:

"Relicensing always requires the consent of the copyright holders."

That doesn't sound quite as doable.

> Do many of the non Apache Foundation Apache2 projects have a single copyright holder?

Doesn't really matter? It's easier to integrate into other projects without written consent from the copyright holders.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 16:32 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> That doesn't sound quite as doable.

I mean: "That doesn't sound quite as easy."

Didn't mean to load the sentence. English isn't easy. :)

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 16:50 UTC (Fri) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

> That doesn't sound quite as doable.

Sure, but that is independent of the choice of license for the fork, no?

It seems some commenters conflate two orthogonal things: the license of the fork and the number of copyright holder of the fork.

Relicensing requires the consent of all copyright holders, whether the fork's license is proprietary or not.

The original comment claimed that relicensing a GPL licenses for was not possible at all, no matter the number of copyright holders.
Which clearly is wrong.