<div dir="ltr">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.<div><br></div><div>XFree86 <i>forked </i>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.<br><div><br></div><div>    Thanks</div><div><br></div><div>    Bruce</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 2:34 PM Rob Landley <<a href="mailto:rob@landley.net">rob@landley.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On 1/8/19 8:13 PM, Brendan Hickey wrote:<br>
> As for the impossibly of relicensing FOSS code under a license that doesn't<br>
> freely allow you to do so, I must disagree. About ten years ago Dungeon Crawl<br>
> was relicensed under the GPLv3. Originally it used the Nethack license, or<br>
> something similar. We contacted about two hundred contributors. In one case we<br>
> secured permission from a contributor's estate. It was a chore, but we did it.<br>
<br>
Toybox did something similar switching from GPLv2 to 0BSD circa 2013 (only had<br>
to contact ~7 developers, removed code from at least one I couldn't contact).<br>
And Linux didn't switch _to_ the GPL until 0.12 (before that it was "no<br>
commercial use"), and Linus clarified he meant "GPLv2" in 2000 (in the<br>
2.4.0-test8 release announcement,<br>
<a href="http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/0096.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.1/0096.html</a> and structually that<br>
was dropping a de-facto dual license in the "or later" clause)...<br>
<br>
There's more or less a standard procedure for it now:<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html</a><br>
<a href="https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/22/license/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/22/license/</a><br>
<a href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License_Relicensing_FAQ" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License_Relicensing_FAQ</a><br>
<a href="https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Contributors" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Contributors</a><br>
<br>
And of course _when_ you do this, it can destroy the project, such as happened<br>
to xfree86:<br>
<br>
<a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/767258/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lwn.net/Articles/767258/</a><br>
<br>
And cdrecord:<br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#License_compatibility_controversy" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#License_compatibility_controversy</a><br>
<br>
Rob<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div>