[rmc]

Remember, you'll need to contact all the authors and they all have to consent to (essentially) relicense their code. Any open source project that accepts patches may have dozens of actual authors. You can't just ask the project maintainer/chief contributor.

[nglevin]

Ideally, a well-organized project would have a copyright assignment process to resolve those sorts of issues.

However, as far as I know you're right. If there's no clear authority as to who retains ownership and licensing rights to the code, and the contributions made to it, it's going to get messy.

[Tuna-Fish]

> Ideally, a well-organized project would have a copyright assignment process to resolve those sorts of issues.

A lot of projects, notably including Linux, intentionally avoid copyright assignment to make it impossible for anyone to relicense the codebase. Making sure that there are thousands of copyright holders from hundreds of jurisdictions, many of who are not easily reachable or even knowable, all bound by common license terms protects the project from situations where some project participants would do something not agreed by the rest, either willingly or because they were forced to (eg. through bankruptcy).

[nglevin]

That's a good observation, some inefficiencies are quite intentional. I didn't even know that about Linux until just the other night, when I was looking for non-GNU GPL projects that didn't require this process.

LWN.net has covered both sides of this subject quite well, in recent months, with the tedious process of relicensing VLC [1] and the GnuTLS copyright assignment controversy [2].

The politics of OSS make for some excellent reading.

[1] - https://lwn.net/Articles/525718/

[2] - https://lwn.net/Articles/529522/

[claudius]

> Ideally, a well-organized project would have a copyright assignment process to resolve those sorts of issues.

That only works in the US, there are various jurisdictions where it is impossible to allow third parties to relicense one’s IP in any way they want.

[nglevin]

Interesting. Do you have details on which jurisdictions do not allow this, and why?

I admit that I'm not familiar with international copyright law. I do know that several GNU projects, and other high profile open source projects, have a policy in place wherein contributors have to agree to a copyright assignment agreement before they can contribute their modifications.

If that's not possible in some regions, they clearly still have some means of continuing to uphold their own IP. I suspect it's not as harsh as completely avoiding contributions from some regions of the world. Unless I'm mistaken.

[claudius]

It is not possible to assign copyright in German IP law, it is non-transferable and tied to the creator of the work or his heirs. There are some ways around this for purely software projects, e.g. the FSF Europe has a license agreement, which covers pretty much everything and should be enough for nearly all uses.

However, similar agreements (i.e. an artist allowing a record company to use his song however they wanted) signed in the 70s have been found to not extend to ‘digital’ uses, of e.g. music, by German courts as this use case did not exist yet at the time the license was granted.

I’m really saying that this is an annoyingly complicated matter and best avoided by not requiring relicensing – and I’m not a lawyer, of course (and also too lazy to find references now).

And, naturally, there is the issue whether you trust the FSF enough to do the right thing.