[Board] Asking permission for re-licensing from LGPL to Apache

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Martin Desruisseaux
<martin.desruisseaux at geomatys.fr> wrote:
> We granted copyright to OSGeo, not to GeoTools.
> When we granted copyright, we understood that OSGeo would have the duty to
> behave according its charter, which is not to protect the economical
> interests of some members or to favour one particular project at the expense
> of an other project.
> We were willing to trim every code not written by ourselves (while of course
> we prefer not having to - see proposal below).
> GeoTools contains thousands of lines of code written by ourselves - when we
> left, we were the authors of 40% of GeoTools 2.6 code base.
> If OSGeo requires GeoTools permission for re-licensing our code, then
> conversely we assume that GeoTools needs our agreement for re-licensing our
> above-cited work.

Martin,

My first order response to this request is that OSGeo holds contributions
and copyright on behalf of the projects and we would normally defer to
the project on re-licensing decisions.

With respect to your point that you (and perhaps other Geotoolkit
contributors) were originally responsible for much of the code in
question I did go back to the contribution agreement:

  http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo/legal/GeotoolsAssignmentToOSGeo.pdf

I highlight:

"The Foundation hereby grants the Contributor the non­exclusive,
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty­free,
license to use, copy, prepare derivative works of, publicly display or
perform, and distribute the Submission."

I *perceive* this as granting back to the original contributor very broad
rights and I would be inclined to treat this as including the right to
re-license the original original contribution.  That is, I believe it is
already within your rights to offer code you personally contributed
under this agreement under other licenses.

This would not apply to code from other contributors without either
their specific permission or with permission of the board (hopefully
after a positive recommendation from the Geotools PSC).

While I have no problem with the Apache license, it would be
a substantial change to move code from LGPL to Apache and
it may well be that other contributors would be quite disturbed
with such a change.

> 5. If OSGeo requires GeoTools permission for re-licensing our code, then conversely we assume that GeoTools needs our agreement for re-licensing our above-cited work.

I do not see the rationale for the above statement.  The primary purpose
of the contribution agreement is to ensure that the project can re-license
code when it has a PSC consensus on a change without having to get
additional agreement from all original contributors.  The GeoTools PSC
is still the duely constituted representative of the project as far as I
know.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer