Am 07.01.2016 um 23:26 schrieb Per Lundqvist: > Hi, > > I am maintaining a port of rsync (https://github.com/perlundq/yajsync) > which is GPL:ed of course. The main purpose of the project is to > provide a Java API library for the rsync protocol. It would > therefore be really nice to be able to use LGPL as the license. > > But in order to do so I would first have to get a list of all the > individual contributors to rsync and then be able to contact them and > ask them to agree to this and also verify their identity. I do however suspect > this to be an almost impossible task... > > Is this as futile as it seems? ;) > > And is there a complete list of contributors available somewhere? > > thanks, > -- > Per Lundqvist >
Hi Per, relicensing the yajsync library with LGPL might be a precondition for the longterm awareness and survivability of the yajsync project. So it's really worth the attempt to relicense. I saw that librsync is as well LGPL'ed. In my view it would have never gotten the attention and usage/linkage it has today with being GPL'ed only. Getting the approval for a relicensing I think the contributions to rsync have to be analyzed in detail to approach a reasonable number of contributors. I experienced that finding a responsible person that is willing to discuss such a case in an organization that contributed source code is nearly impossible. Looking at the source code (my short analysis refers to rsync-3.1.1) some questions come to my mind to simplify the relicensing discussion: - the GPL headers in the source code mention copyright owners: might it be sufficient to approach these copyright owners and leave out every patch author? - the yajsync implementation refers to a subset of rsync: does the derivative work comprise only the according parts of the rsync source code? - supposed some parts of yajsync were developed looking at the rsync interface definition (the man page) only [I can state this for the small parts I contributed to yajsync]. Are these parts still derivative work to rsync? - supposed an author contributed a part of rsync like the md5 implementation that is not in use in yajsync because of a Java replacement: does such an author have to be approached? Focusing on the source code only without tests, config scripts and free libraries (zlib and popt) and without common knowledge functions like md5 or sprintf or getaddrinfo or getpass and without rsync-batch I come up with the following individuals being mentioned with a copyright: Wayne Davison Andrew Tridgell Martin Pool Jeremy Allison (maybe only indirectly by code copy) Paul Mackerras Scott Howard Maybe you could approach these people first to get the process started. Regards, Florian -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
