On 08/11/11 02:08, Olivier Beaton wrote:
And here's where I currently stand with my own
work. I'm no expert on
licensing and my wording so far may not be great, but there seems to
be some concern in BSD-like licenses that without such a clause in a
shared-commit environment can lead to trouble. Zend Framework is
BSD-3-Clause'd and has a contributor agreement to handle IP issues
(and not for any dual-licensing goals).
My recommendation is that you contact people who commit code to your
extension, and request that they agree to license their contributions
under a BSD-style license.
If they do not agree to do this, then you can merge their changes out
of your fork on
olivierbeaton.com. But knowing the MediaWiki
community, I doubt that that will ever happen.
Localisation commits may be slightly tricky. At
<http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:About> it says
"Derivative works may also be licensed under the licenses of the
respective Free and Open Source projects the translations have been or
will be added to."
So in principle it will be fine, but if you wanted to obtain an
assurance from every individual translator as to whether have truly
agreed to that licensing policy, you would be facing a challenge. If
worst comes to worst, you can always distribute a pure-BSD fork which
is stripped of localisations derived from
translatewiki.net.
As I said before, I don't think a normal contributor agreement can be
binding, because you don't control access to the repository. I also
don't think your browse-wrap style contract will be binding on all
contributors. In OTRS you wrote:
/*
By comitting against this file you retain copyright for your
contributions and grant
them to Olivier Finlay Beaton under the same BSD-2-Clause license
(attribution).
*/
You can't make a contract with someone in such a passive way, you have
to bring the terms to their attention somehow and extract their active
agreement. Also, as with the copyright assignment, there's a lack of
consideration. The committer can explicitly refuse to enter the
contract and then commit anyway.
That's why I think that if you want to have a pure-BSD extension with
solid legal footing, you should drop these headers from your source
files and rely on direct email contact with the extension
contributors. That would also have the advantage of being less
controversial.
-- Tim Starling