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

[Bruce Perens]

I have helped a large government lab and their legal counsel to do a
license transition on Open Source with a big external developer community.
We know well how to do it.

XFree86 *forked *twice when license decisions prompted the developers to
decide that their current management was an impediment to the project. It
didn't destroy the project either time, it just made a particular
organization irrelevant to its future.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 2:34 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> 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
>
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>
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>
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