Re: [gentoo-dev] Watch out for license changes to GPL-3.

["Harald van Dijk" <truedfx@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 08:52:30PM +0200, Wulf C. Krueger wrote:
> On Sunday, 08. July 2007 20:15:31 Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > > No, you have to get permission of the copyright holders. Which, in
> > > this case, is the Foundation.
> > Could you back that up, please? I was looking for something to confirm
> > or deny this myself, but didn't find anything.
> 
> It's in the copyright notice of every single ebuild:
> 
> "# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation"
> 
> Thus, the copyright owner/holder is the Gentoo Foundation.

If I write an ebuild today, why does it not say "Copyright 2007"? It's
because the copyright notice applies to skel.ebuild and/or the tree as a
whole. Whether it also applies to the individual contributions is what
I'm curious about.

> The Foundation 
> can therefore decide to change the licence.

If the Foundation is the copyright holder, then agreed, it can.

> >   "Note that the Foundation would never change the license used for the
> >    code or documentation, if that could be set in stone that would be
> >    even better."
> > Is this still relevant?
> 
> Hopefully not as it is, stated as simple as that, not very wise. 
> 
> It's probably *meant* to say that the Foundation will never switch to a 
> closed-source model but it shouldn't rule out switching to GPL-3 should 
> that turn out to be desirable.

If you can give a clear way to separate licenses which should be
allowable, from those which should not, then please share. Would it mean
that the Foundation might change to the CDDL, for example? If not, why
not?
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