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

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Hello Ben

Thanks you very much for your reply. There is some notes in-line, 
followed by a request to the OSGeo board and a modification of our 
request to the GeoTools PMC.


Le 30/07/12 08:00, Ben Caradoc-Davies a écrit :
> although I am a member of the PMC, I am now writing as an individual: 
> I personally agree with Frank's interpretation that contributors can 
> relicense their own contributions as they see fit. In fact, before 
> seeing your email quoting Frank, I quoted this same section of the 
> contributor agreement on another list.
>
> Martin, I welcome your approach to the OSGeo board, because the 
> interpretation of this clause affects all OSGeo projects and should be 
> addressed by the OSGeo board.

I agree that this question should be resolved by the OSGeo board. My 
email sent last Friday [1] was asking for such clarification. While 
waiting for an acknowledgement from the OSGeo board that our request has 
been received, we try to get other advises about our rights. I have sent 
an email to Adrian Custer, who wrote the Copyright Assignment together 
with a Lawyer [2]. Adrian confirmed us that the Copyright Assignment 
intend is to give maximal rights to the contributor, including the right 
to distribute their own contribution under other licenses - providing 
that all other contributions have been removed.


> I note that in the link you give above, it seems to me that Jody was 
> explicitly referring to relicensing *all* of GeoTools 2.6. This is 
> quite different to the licence that is granted to you under your 
> contributor agreement to use your own contributions. These are quite 
> separate issues and it would be helpful if we keep them separate as in 
> in my view the PMC can only address questions about GeoTools, not the 
> meaning of the OSGeo agreement.

I agree that they are separated issues, as I said last Friday [3]. 
Admittedly, my earlier emails was not making the distinction as clear 
(while we never asked for relicensing all of GeoTools 2.6).


> I am looking forward to the resolution of this issue.

We would also appreciate a lot (this is my request) a formal statement 
from OSGeo stating whatever the right to "use, copy, prepare derivative 
works of, publicly display or
perform, and distribute the Submission" granted to every contributors by 
the Copyright Assignment includes the right to distribute the submission 
(and only the submission) under an other license, as Adrian said that it 
was intended, and on-per with the rights of those who signed the 
Contributor Agreement instead than the Copyright Assignment.

I have no problem if OSGeo wishes to restrict that right to approved 
open-source licenses. While such restriction doesn't seem to be the 
original intend, it would not affect us.

Provided that OSGeo confirms this contributor's right, then I would like 
to modify our request to the GeoTools PMC: we would like to withdrawn 
all our requests to re-license any GeoTools code, in any modules 
including the "core" ones. We had a discussion at Geomatys and we think 
that it would be in the best communities interest to make the projects 
individuality clearer.

In the hope to see this issue resolved,

     Regards,

         Martin


[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2012-July/009912.html
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/2008-January/000867.html
[3] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2012-July/009920.html