On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Could you elaborate on that?
Given that I wasn't using the GPL, I was concerned that anyone committing against my code would do so under "all rights reserved" and would effectively be forking my code from the point of their revision. I wanted to make sure the code stayed under my BSD-2-Clause license.
My first stab at this was to use a contributor agreement that contained a copyright assignment, as people do for dual-licensing with GPL code. A little bit later I found the Zend Framework license, which uses a BSD-3-Clause and a contributor agreement (which forces contributions to give ZF a license to the code in the contribution, not copyright assignment) and I quickly changed to suit. Rob seems to think this may still be unnecessary, and I've sent a mail to the OSI license-discuss mailing to list for clarification on that matter.
But the discussion as I set it out in my previous email with the 3 questions are much more general then my own particular case, and I think the community would benefit from consensus on how applications in each case should be handled in the future.
Q1. Should WMF allow Dual-Licensed extensions in the MediaWiki repo?
Q2. Should people using any OSI approved license without modification be able to use the MediaWiki repo?
Q3. Should people who add a clause to their license that all contributions are to be made under the same license be turned away?
I gave my thoughts one each question in my previous email. My original request would of been answered by a clear stance on Q1. My current code would have a clear answer given Q3. But I doubt I will be the last to try any of the 3.