On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 14:30, Allen Pulsifer <pulsi...@openoffice.org> wrote: >>>> Which is why I raised the question regarding TDF's ability to >>>> relicense all of the contributions it has received. >>> >>> As I understand it Noel, TDF accepts contributions under open source >>> licenses alone and unlike ASF does not require a contributor license >>> agreement, so is unable to relicense the last 8 months of work under >>> any license incompatible with the ones used by those contributions. > >> Unable is a strong word. I given that we are talking about historically >> recent contributions, >> I would think that it would be possible to identify and reach out to those >> who made these >> contributions. These people, after all, DO hold the copyrights. > > In fact, as I pointed out earlier, about 75% to 90% of the LIbreOffice > contributions have been made by the employees of a handful of companies, > primarily Linux distributors such as Novell, Red Hat and Canonical. So in > fact, if those companies decided to join in an Apache Licensed effort, this > issue would be largely addressed.
That is actually quite an interesting point. If the work contributed to the TDF was done under "work for hire" rules, then those companies could contribute the same work to the ASF with a simple Software Grant stating something like "all commits to the TDF performed by $PERSON between $START and $END". There are certainly issues between the employee/employer on whether that is even possible (eg. in some jurisdictions, employees own the work they did at home, on their own hardware). ... could be messy, but some contributions may be possible. And yes, I *do* recognize that the employees might be quite upset at their employer in some cases. Not trying to diminish the personal vs corporate aspects here. But a great thought... Cheers, -g --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
