[osmosis-dev] Licence ...

[Stefan Baebler]

I consider my contributions so minor that i hereby give you all the
power to relicense them as you please.

Stefan
/trying to shorten possibly never-ending license debate :)

Brett Henderson wrote:
> I hate to bring this topic up because I don't know if I have the 
> necessary patience for it :-)
> 
> Osmosis is currently GPL3.  At one point I was going to use GPL2 or 
> later but the use of the Apache bzip2 implementation precludes that.
> 
> The number of authors is fairly low at the moment so there is still a 
> chance to change the licence.
> 
> At this point I'm wishing I'd just released it as public domain in the 
> first place.  I don't intend to make money from it, I don't care what 
> people do with it, and the recent discussions on legal-talk have 
> convinced me that any gains that a copyleft licence might achieve are 
> dwarfed by the problems that licence compatibility causes.  The use of 
> bzip2 libraries has already forced my hand in one direction, and it's 
> likely to only get worse.  Osmosis is a piece of plumbing that is most 
> useful if it can be used anywhere.
> 
> My motivation for creating osmosis in the first place was simply that my 
> day job no longer had a technical component and I wanted a hobby 
> software project to tinker with.  It quickly grew into a bigger time 
> sink than I originally planned but my reasons for involvement are still 
> that it is a hobby.  I get more satisfaction out of seeing people using 
> something I've built than I do out of any recognition for being the 
> author.  At this point my time is becoming more limited so I see my role 
> becoming less central but I'd like to make sure that everything 
> including the licence status is robust before I drop anything.
> 
> So, what are people's thoughts?  There are approximately half a dozen 
> contributors so far who I can mail separately if required (or name them 
> on this list, not sure what the etiquette is here).  With one exception 
> (initial 0.6 support) most patches have been fairly self contained and 
> could be replaceable if required.  If there's no major arguments I'll 
> send the existing authors an email over the next few days asking 
> permission to release all software as public domain.  If that goes 
> smoothly then the existing licence text can be removed and replaced with 
> a public domain dedication statement of some kind.
> 
> Brett
> 
> 
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> 


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