Hello Christofer,
The interesting part is contribution copyright assignment. I actually do _not_ want Nuitka to have to stay GPLv3 when it's "ready". Then I _definitely_ want it to have another license, with "ASF2.0" being the current front runner.I'm not a fan of copyright assignment, and would like to find (if possible) a solution that gives you what you need without requiring it. Requiring copyright assignment allows you to "pull an Oracle." I mean no offense by that and I hope you understand my intent in saying that.
I take no offense from it. I didn't describe my intents to receive the trust (doesn't matter on legal), just to be considered worth the effort.
Would it be possible to have, instead, a contributor agreement that allows contributors to retain copyright while at the same time granting you a non-transferable, non-revokable, exclusive right to relicense their contribution under the ASF2.0 license at a time of your choosing? This allows contributors to "know what they're getting into." It allows you to transition smoothly from GPLv3 to ASF2.0 when you feel the "time is right," while allowing contributors the comfort of retaining copyright to their code, knowing that they will not later face all their work being swallowed up as in, for example, OpenSolaris.
That sounds great and is perfectly acceptable to me. It will achieve my goals. I only loose the freedom to pick another license. But now that I checked things, I would be comfortable with ASF 2.0 and don't consider any other license an option anyway.
This grant to you would be non-revokable (for your comfort) and non-transferrable (for the contributor's comfort). It would be exclusive to you as an agreement between you and the person submitting code to you. Is this sort of thing even workable? I'd be interested in the opinions d-l at large, as well.
If I make it non-specific to me, it would mean that everybody gets this right and can transfer it via Debian BTS to me as well. A patch by Debian user "X" would then be send to Debian who has then the right, and forwarded by maintainer/user "Y" who received it from Debian to me.
I think it works for "ASF2.0" itself that way too, so it should be possible and compatible to "GPLv3" for the time being. I would of course allow to remove that provision.
And as only I own the existing source code, only I could exercise the right in a meaningful way, so I wouldn't take a risk from sharing that right.
Of course, if the consensus is that it must be specific, and it cannot be transfered via BTS, I can still use the code and seek the right or redo the change if that fails to work.
Yours, Kay