License Committee Report for December 2009

[Russ Nelson]

Okay, I'll pass that on to the board.  Oh, wait, you just did.  Well,
anyway, now we know that you considered it, tried it, and it didn't
work.

Dave Page writes:
 > On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
 > > Dave Page writes:
 > >  > Where can I find out the result of this submission?
 > >
 > > Hi, Dave, sorry for not getting back to you.  I was away in India
 > > during this board meeting, and didn't convey the board's decision to
 > > you.  The board wishes to know if you have considered relicensing
 > > under the MIT License?  If you construe your work as a collective
 > > copyright of all contributors, then any copyright holder is free to
 > > license under any terms as long as they compensate all other copyright
 > > holders.  In the open source world, relicensing from your license to
 > > the MIT license is a change of no effect, so no compensation would be
 > > due.
 > 
 > Hi Russ,
 > 
 > As I understand it (based on advice from SFLC about a year ago in
 > relation to a different project), we wouldn't be able to claim
 > collective copyright as we inherited the original code and licence
 > from UC Berkeley. It was only appropriate for the other project
 > because from day one, all code was attributed to the defined group
 > that made up the project team - and even then, we were advised to get
 > explicit permission to relicence from all contributors and to avoid
 > relying on collective copyright. A large part of the reason for that
 > was that we had a German developer who disagreed with the change, and
 > German law does not allow individual contributors to relicence.
 > 
 > Regardless of that however, the project's core team has previously
 > discussed and rejected any change of licence.
 > 
 > -- 
 > Dave Page
 > PostgreSQL Core Team