[beyond-licensing] Legal topics that FOSS projects could use more information on

[Richard Fontana]

On 06/15/2016 10:50 AM, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Danese Cooper wrote:
>>> On Jun 15, 2016, at 7:23 AM, Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't claim to have all the data here, then; how did it have the
>>> right to relicense code contributed by others before that point?  Is
>>> "accumulation" acquiring full copyright control to the code, or
>>> merely the right to relicense?
>>
>> Because Mozilla doesn't aggregate copyrights they were forced to
>> assemble majority agreement before relicensing. It took more than 2
>> years. I know about this because Sun was the last major contributor to
>> sign the agreement.

Ah, I misunderstood what Brian was referring to - I was thinking of the
situation *after* Mozilla had gone ahead with the tri-license.

But the situation after that relicensing effort shows that Mozilla has
decided that the legal risk of not being able to easily relicense beyond
MPL (or GPL/LGPL) is something they have chosen to accept despite the
earlier experience.