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

[Danese Cooper]

> On Jun 15, 2016, at 8:17 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana at opensource.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.

Surely there is no upside in initiating copyright aggregation for contributions submitted after the majority of the code has been written?

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