[License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software License, Version 1.3 (C-FSL v1.3)

[Rob Landley]

On 1/8/19 8:13 PM, Brendan Hickey wrote:
> As for the impossibly of relicensing FOSS code under a license that doesn't
> freely allow you to do so, I must disagree. About ten years ago Dungeon Crawl
> was relicensed under the GPLv3. Originally it used the Nethack license, or
> something similar. We contacted about two hundred contributors. In one case we
> secured permission from a contributor's estate. It was a chore, but we did it.

Toybox did something similar switching from GPLv2 to 0BSD circa 2013 (only had
to contact ~7 developers, removed code from at least one I couldn't contact).
And Linux didn't switch _to_ the GPL until 0.12 (before that it was "no
commercial use"), and Linus clarified he meant "GPLv2" in 2000 (in the
2.4.0-test8 release announcement,
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/0096.html and structually that
was dropping a de-facto dual license in the "or later" clause)...

There's more or less a standard procedure for it now:

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/22/license/
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License_Relicensing_FAQ
https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Contributors

And of course _when_ you do this, it can destroy the project, such as happened
to xfree86:

https://lwn.net/Articles/767258/

And cdrecord:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#License_compatibility_controversy

Rob