[License-discuss] FAQ entry on CLAs

[John A. Lewis - Pointful]

The possible need for re-licensing under a different open source license is
one the biggest reasons I am generally an advocate for CLAs (with an
appropriate community-based governance organization like the ASF). I find
the cautionary tale of the Mozilla Relicensing Effort [1] illuminating
-- it took 4.5 years to track down 445 contributors and get appropriate
permission so that Firefox/Thunderbird/etc could be directly included into
Linux distros. All of which could have been avoided with an Apache-style
CLA in place.

[1] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
[2] http://blog.gerv.net/2006/03/relicensing_complete/



On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:02 PM, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk>
wrote:
>
>
> One of the uses of CLA's is to allow the software to be re-licensed under
> a different open source licence.  This can prove highly desirable, but
> almost impossible, if there are large numbers of contributions under the
> old licence.  It might be needed because it has become important to
> integrate the work with work under and otherwise incompatible open source
> licence.  In the past, I think it has been necessary to remove
> contributions from a minor contributor, to achieve this, because they were
> unable or unwilling to licence it under the new licence. (Something similar
> happened with OpenStreetmap's map database; some geographical features had
> to be removed because the project was unable to get permission to use it
> under a new, less restrictive, licence.)
>
>
>
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