On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 12:12 PM, Aaron Meurer <[email protected]> wrote: > To be completely honest I don't know who is right here. What does the "SymPy > Development Team" in the license refer to? If, as Francesco suggests, it > refers to the AUTHORS file, then I think we were wrong to accept certain > authors' wishes in removing their names from that file. If, as Ondřej > suggests, it refers to the git history, then it seems to me that the > addition to the diophant addition to the LICENSE file is unnecessary. We > would have to ask a lawyer to see.
The "SymPy Development Team" means all authors who submitted their code to SymPy. Most of them are in the git history, except the few people in AUTHORS that are not part of the git history. We should probably clarify this in the LICENSE file. Well, the BSD license says you have to copy the "copyright line", so we need to copy Sergey's copyright line. So I think it is necessary to copy his license somewhere either way. > It wouldn't be illegal. That's the whole point of the BSD. You give up full > rights to your code. That's not my understanding. I think you keep full copyright rights to your code. Every single SymPy's author owns the code he or she produced. However, they give SymPy the right (or permission or license) to distribute that code under the BSD license. We could make this permission explicit by a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), where each author would sign a paper saying they are giving SymPy a license to use their code under the SymPy's BSD license. However, as you and I and others have discussed in the past, the legal improvement here doesn't seem to be worth the pain of doing that. However, if we know or expect that the author might not be willing to give us that permission, then I would be worried, because such an author can always say --- I didn't give SymPy a license to use this, and the LICENSE in my private repository doesn't cover this code for this purpose, or something like that. > However, Sergey could change the license (for future > code), and I think he has also stated that he only licenses code once it is > merged into master. So I agree it is best to get his general permission. That's right, let's get his permission, then all is fine. The reason I didn't merge my PR is that I didn't get his permission. Ondrej -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CADDwiVAG1dBLhHsuG5nQSMpzFS8ZGHprwhcAts8HW1SwBBrAgg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
