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

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Hello Frank

Le 27/07/12 00:46, Frank Warmerdam a écrit :
> "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.

We were unsure about this interpretation, and thus asked to the board. 
We have always been told in the past to ask to the GeoTools PMC. The 
thread at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=29573891 
suggests that different interpretations exist.


>> 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.

I fully agree with you and we signed the copyright assignment in this 
purpose. The point here was to highlight what we perceived as an 
unbalanced treatment prior your reply to our request.

Thanks you very much for bringing those clarifications,

     Martin