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

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Hello all

I would like to know the board position on the interpretation below. Are 
contributors who granted their copyright to OSGeo allowed to re-license 
their own work to an other open source license? We have no problem in 
waiting for the conclusion of OSGeo debate about the work done by other 
contributors, but we would appreciate to know if we can start proceeding 
with our own work.

     Martin



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