[123673] trunk/base/src

[Joshua Root]

On 2014-8-12 22:47 , David Evans wrote:
> On 8/12/14 5:04 AM, Clemens Lang wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Of course, a sure fire approach would be to see if Berry would be
>>> willing to assign any copyright interest he might have in the code
>>> to The MacPorts Project.
>> That might be the case for US jurisdictions, but not for the EU. For
>> example, as a German citizen, I cannot assign my copyright – it will
>> always be mine. I can grant usage rights, but that's different.
>>
>> Of course other organizations (such as, e.g., the GNU project) do it
>> anyway – I'm just saying if we're going to open that can of worms,
>> we can either
>>  (a) do it the full-blown way, employ a few lawyers across borders,
>>      draft a document and have everybody submit that before
>>      accepting patches. I think this would considerably slow down
>>      our (already slow) processes.
>>  (b) continue to ignore the issue as we have so far in the interest
>>      of simplicity.
>> Obviously (a) would be the correct thing to do. Unfortunately,
>> "correct" costs time, and eats up more of the time we could use to
>> get stuff done that actually matters.
>>
>> So, if you care enough about the issue, feel free to revert the
>> change. Cc'ing jberry, because, if any, his rights are being
>> violated here.
>>
> Interesting.
> 
> Yes, I think conferring with Berry is the appropriate approach.  If he
> doesn't mind then the issue is moot.

Condition number 1 in the BSD license is that the copyright notices must
be preserved. If there's any doubt about whether some code you have
copied is sufficiently large and/or creative to be subject to copyright,
assume it is and preserve the notices. That's not an onerous task.

I don't think that getting permission from specific contributors to
distribute their code under a different license is a path we want to go
down.

- Josh