Re: [Duplicity-talk] Version 0.5.07 Released

[Kenneth Loafman]

Michael Terry wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Kenneth Loafman <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Add/update copyright statements in all distribution source files
>> and revert duplicity to GPL version 2 license.
> 
> This is an interesting change.  Can you talk about why?  Can you even
> do that without the agreement of all copyright holders (which IANAL,
> but I think are people that have contributed non-trivial patches)?
> 
> I know I've seen projects that have switched licenses, and it was an
> involved process.  They had to hunt down all the people that committed
> patches and if they couldn't contact them, rewrite the code.  It leads
> me to believe it's not so simple.

I'm not a lawyer either.  The project was originally GPLv2.  I swapped
to GPLv3 thinking it would be "a good thing", and the only thing it did
was slow the adoption of duplicity because of the license.  A lot of
commercial interests will not touch GPLv3 licensed code for fear of
risking their own code and I'm not interested in causing that much
trouble.  I would rather have it used than sit on the shelf.

It could even be argued that the change to GPLv3 was not valid since I
never contacted anyone but the original author, and there were a few
contributors before then.  None of them were contacted.

I don't know what the rules are w.r.t. code contributions, other than
the need to be aware of possible patent infringement, and I'm fairly
certain we're clean in that area.  It would have to be a fairly obscure
patent for me not to have found it.

If anyone has an objection to the change, this would be the place to
speak up.  I can pull the code or rewrite it, if you so request.

...Ken

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