Re: Bug#388141: Let's ask for a relicensing agreement

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

> ----------------------8<----------------------8<----------------------
> 
>   I hereby give permission to relicense all the material that I have
> provided to the Debian website under the terms of the MIT (Expat)
> License and/or of the GNU General Public License, version 2 and any 
> later version.
> 
> ---------------------->8---------------------->8----------------------
> 
> A bit pedantic but safer...  Any thought?

Hi all,

I do not see the need for the following complications:

 1) giving the permission to relicense instead of relicensing directly.

 2) complex license semantics where one can write: license is “MIT or GPL-2+”.

I have not seen anywhere else asymetric uses of “and” and “or” depending on
who is the donor and who is the receiver.  For instance, “GPL-2” is always
“or (at your option) any later…”.

Why not simply:

----------------------8<----------------------8<----------------------
The material that I have provided to the Debian website is hereby
licensed under the terms of the MIT (Expat) License or, at your option,
of the GNU General Public License; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
----------------------8<----------------------8<----------------------

This paraphrases the terms on http://www.debian.org/license, therefore
bringing full compatibility.

Note that by practical purposes, “MIT or GPL-2+” is a license of its own.
Otherwise, one would not be able to drop the MIT terms because it states
“The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

See http://jquery.org/license/ for another example of “MIT or GPL” code.
Debian receives and redistributes it as MIT or GPL.  Therefore, it is also
possible for Debian to receive contributions under “MIT or GPL-2+” and
redistribute them under the same terms, without having to drop one of the
terms.

Cheers,

-- 
Charles