On 1/25/13 7:12 AM, "Greg Reddin" <gred...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 3:35 AM, christofer.d...@c-ware.de <
> christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote:
>
>> So ... does this have any impact on the plans to donate? Is it now harder
>> to donate or does it make stuff even easier?
>>
>
> To my knowledge the current licensing strategy of the product has no
> bearing on its donation. My assumption is that, by donating it, Velo
> asserts that he has intellectual property rights to the software, and he's
> passing those rights on to Apache. Apache can then relicense the software
> if/when we get ready to release it.
But I would say it means that a donation is now required. My idea of having
you just borrow code from its current repository is now void because you
cannot borrow GPL code.
Also, there could be some trickiness in that Velo has to be certain that he
has the right to re-license the code as Apache license. Whether he does
that before or after donation may not matter, but effectively, it is being
re-licensed. I don't know the GPL terms and what contributor agreement he
had, but that might dictate whether he has the authority to re-license.
Finally, do we really have to have this code? How many of us committers
will actually make changes to and release from this code base? If it just
Chris, then I would argue we don't really have a community around it. I am
not motivated to work on what has been described as a old monolithic beast,
but I would be more willing to help out with the new code for the Apache
Flex releases.
So, the way I see it, Velo has to re-license to Apache one way or another or
we have to find a way not to copy significant portions of that code.
--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
