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

[Richard Fontana]

On 06/15/2016 11:20 AM, Danese Cooper wrote:

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

I think there is an upside, since until that happens you don't know if
it ever will happen - I would assert that the vast majority of open
source projects do not relicense during their active lifetime. So until
that possibly-nonexistent future event the project arguably benefits
from the absence of copyright aggregation.

There may be less of an upside if you think there is a high likelihood
that some project will experience such a future copyright
aggregation-requiring event.

("Initiating copyright aggregation" may be the wrong concept here -- I
believe what would be more typical, not that these things happen very
often, is that a relicensing effort would involve getting past
contributors to agree to the new license, rather than granting a broad
license or assigning copyright to whatever entity was managing legal
matters for the project.)