[OpenID] JanRain library licensing (was: Re: On OpenID 2.0)

[Kevin Turner]

Oh, here I was in the middle of composing a reply to a message earlier
in this thread with the subject changed to "a holy war about licenses,"
but you beat me to it. 

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 12:22 -0700, Josh Hoyt wrote:
> On 5/2/07, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is it possible to release the JanRain license under GPL-then? And,
> > this might be the larger sticking point, offer it with Drupal code
> > style (seems doubtful)?
> 
> All earlier library releases were GPL.

You mean LGPL.

>  We'd dual-license it if that would help. 

It might be tricky to dual-license with a more restrictive license now.
Sort of.  Not because I have a problem with licensing the code to anyone
under the terms of the GPL -- the licenses we've used (LGPL and Apache
v2) grant you all the permissions the GPL does and more -- but it
probably implies something about how people expect contributions to be
treated.  If the code is bundled with Drupal (which is all GPL) and
people check in patches to it, and the patches have enough original
content to warrant copyright, and the contributor assumes the patches
will be treated as GPL *and* has problems with his contribution being
treated as Apache v2,

then we have a problem.

(That was a lot of "if"s.)

But then, it's a problem that can probably be fixed with a more explicit
IPR policy on library contributions.  For the sake of sanity, it's
probably best to have contributors assign copyright to a single
copyright holder anyway.  (If a contributor chose not to do that, they
could still fork, but in that case hopefully it would be a conscious
decision to fork, and not a patch lost in license-limbo.)


Okay.  If you see me trying to make another post about this today, kick
me, as Python rc3 needs to happen now.