[gdal-dev] GDAL license and copyright

[Even Rouault]

Le lundi 18 janvier 2016 19:59:01, Aaron Boxer a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> I am trying to learn more about how open source projects manage copyright
> of contributors.
> I see that various GDAL files have different copyright assignees, although
> they all use the MIT
> license.
> 
> Is this difficult to manage? 

Not until now. Copyright assignment to a single entity can be useful when 
dealing with potential future license changes, but given that X/MIT is one of 
the less restrictive license, it is unlikely to be needed to be changed.

> For example, if GDAL is packaged for a
> distribution such as Fedora,
> how do you manage the license for the package? 

I think distributions refer to the LICENSE.TXT file at the root of GDAL source 
tree. The global licensing implications can however by more complex if you 
link GDAL with third-party libraries that can be GPL, LGPL, proprietary, 
etc...

> Also, if a new contributor
> were to add new functionality in a new file, is it ok for them to assign
> copyright to themselves when submitting to the trunk ?

Yes.

> 
> Thanks very much,
> Aaron

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