On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 09:14:11AM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> I also wanted to volunteer my time to help with this part of the
> solution whenever the Debian community is ready to move forward. I have
> some experiencing handling mass-relicensing of copyrights when no
> copyright assignments are in place. For example, through my work at the
> Software Freedom Conservancy, I assisted the Squeak community in
> relicensing their software under a Free Software license (previously it
> had been under a semi-Free Software, "no commercial only" license).
>
> It's a common misconception that relicensing cannot be done without
> copyright assignment and/or by getting explicit, written assent from
> each copyright holder. While explicit and written assent from each
> copyright holder is the ideal, various public mechanisms and call for
> comment periods can be used for those contributors that are difficult to
> track down.
>
> I don't think there's any need to go into the details about this now; my
> point in sending this email is to offer my help as a volunteer when the
> Debian community is ready to handle the relicensing from OPL.
Hi Bradley, I'm getting back to you about the above as in Debian we're
now ready to finalize the relicensing of www.debian.org ("www.d.o" for
short) from OPL and could use some expert advice on the next steps.
A bit of context on the status quo:
- starting 25 January 2012, we've chosen as license for new content dual
MIT/GPL2+ [1] See http://www.debian.org/license
- the Debian WWW team (who is reading this discussion via the buglog)
has proceeded to ask contributors of old content the permission to
relicense their past contributions from OPL. See
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=388141#321
for the template of the declarations they've collected. That dates
back to February 2012
- 6 month later, the progress is fairly good, quoting from
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=388141#331
> alioth members: out of 216
> 164 ok for dual licence
> 1 for public domain
> 2 for GPL only
> 49 remaning
we've already pinged the missing contributors, getting as little as 10
more answers.
I believe at this point we've got close to as much as we could get via
explicit requests. Some requests will remain unanswered. You mentioned
that it is possible to complete the process via some sort of public
call, with (my guess) a "deadline" before proceeding.
Can you help us out with this?
Needless to say, that would be very much appreciated!
Cheers.
[1]: yes, that's equivalent to MIT alone, but we advertise it as dual
mostly for documentation purposes: some content users might be more
familiar with GPL and would be reassured by seeing it mentioned
--
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