[Open-graphics] Subversion commit policy

[Vinicius Santos]

On 4/5/07, Simon <simon80 at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I was thinking about this lately, and I realized that I didn't
> articulate my actual concern about the license.  If the work is dual
> licensed under the GPL, then it should be ok for someone who is
> reusing the code to completely replace the dual license blurb with a
> generic GPL license blurb (leaving the copyright notice in, of
> course), whereas those two clauses seem to imply that that's not ok to
> do.  That's why I originally said that clause 7 should go to the
> start, and everything else should get moved out, because if someone
> relicenses the work under the GPL, they only really need to keep the
> definitions and the GPL blurb in.

The only people who can (re)license the work are the copyright holders. Since
the Traversal license will require commercial agreements, people with read
(anonymous or not) access to the svn will only be getting the code
under the GPL license. So I guess every file in the svn having
traversal copyright and the GPL license might be sufficient for
Traversal at anytime to relicense the code, for the read access part
of the issue. Anyone who modifies the code who was fetched from the
svn(or other future distributions) is making a derivative GPL work,
and we can do nothing about that.

For write access, requiring every commiter to sign a real physical
legal agreement of copyright attribution would be the safest way.

Now for mail list patches it might become too much bureaucratic and
keep people from helping with small patches, specially in the
beginning of the project, but it won't hurt that much. We must be
confident in the willingness of people to comply with the rules fi
they really want to help the project.

But IANAL, and laws might not follow this logic(or lack of it ;) ).
Well, there might even be labor laws who might require other needs
because of copyright assignment to a profit organization (ie. explicit
donation statement, so that it doesn't characterize as slave labor
since commiters are not getting paid :) ). Ok, I will stop diverging
from the issue, but Traversal do need a lawyer. :)

(Sorry for restating previous discussion, but the "someone
relicensing" caught my attention)
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