There was questions raised on licensing at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList#OLPC_Wishlist
Perhaps you can talk to Spot (cc'ed) and get it clarified?
Rahul
I've included below the correspondence between VPRI and Debian in regard the license question.
regards.
-walter
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kim Rose kim.rose@vpri.org Date: Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 8:26 AM Subject: Fwd: Squeak images/relicensing To: Walter Bender walter.bender@gmail.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de
Hi, Walter -
Here is a copy of my message to Jose.
-- Kim
Begin forwarded message:
From: Kim Rose kim.rose@vpri.org Date: April 4, 2008 9:18:11 AM PDT To: José L. Redrejo RodrÃguez jredrejo@edu.juntaextremadura.net Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de, Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki@vpri.org, Craig Latta craig@netjam.org, Kim Rose kim@vpri.org Subject: Squeak images/relicensing
Hi, Jose -
I hope you and your family are all doing well.
I have seen the recent exchange of email between you and others regarding the relicensing effort of Squeak to the MIT License. I can see you are mostly up to date with what is going on. However, as Bert has requested I wanted to write to you directly and confirm Bert's most recent responses.
Jose:
Can you confirm me that the code that has not been relicensed has been removed from the olpc image?
Bert:
No. But VPRI as the original authors take responsibility for the earlier contributions made under the Squeak License. VPRI made every justifiable effort to contact the contributors. Not a single contributor was against relicensing, so it is safe to assume that even those that could not be reached would be happy to see their code continue to be used. They submitted it for official inclusion in Squeak, after all. So who would argue that, if not the contributors themselves?
As Bert says VPRI spearheaded an effort to contact *every* contributor to the Squeak code base. We did not receive a single negative response and have a notebook with 100s of signed re-licensing agreements. We also put out several "speak now or forever hold your peace" group emails indicating the relicensing was taking effect and should anyone object to relicensing their code to let us know.
Our attitude is the code IS now relicensed under the MIT license. Should, a contributor, at any time, write to VPRI and request their code be taken out of the code base, we would comply.
Please do not let this interfere with or hold up your efforts.
Thanks again and best regards, Kim
On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 08:49 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
I've included below the correspondence between VPRI and Debian in regard the license question.
I'm not sure it is safe to assume that because a contributor was not reached, they are therefore okay with permitting a second party to relicense their copyrighted work.
~spot
Any suggestions as to how to proceed then? The VPRI team has agreed to remove/rewrite any contributions that people don't want relicensed.
-walter
On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Tom spot Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com wrote:
On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 08:49 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
I've included below the correspondence between VPRI and Debian in regard the license question.
I'm not sure it is safe to assume that because a contributor was not reached, they are therefore okay with permitting a second party to relicense their copyrighted work.
~spot
On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 10:28 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
Any suggestions as to how to proceed then? The VPRI team has agreed to remove/rewrite any contributions that people don't want relicensed.
Either of those options would be the logical next step (you have to assume that non-responsive contributors do not agree to a relicensing, unless there is some sort of contributor agreement in place which stipulates otherwise). When the source tree is 100% MIT (or some other equally free license), then we should have no problem including it in Fedora.
~spot
Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 10:28 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
Any suggestions as to how to proceed then? The VPRI team has agreed to remove/rewrite any contributions that people don't want relicensed.
Either of those options would be the logical next step (you have to assume that non-responsive contributors do not agree to a relicensing, unless there is some sort of contributor agreement in place which stipulates otherwise). When the source tree is 100% MIT (or some other equally free license), then we should have no problem including it in Fedora.
When there was a discussion about the possibility of relicensing the Linux kernel to GPLv3, there was a proposal that involved the legality of unilateral declaration followed by a time gap for opposition instead of getting explicit written agreement from all the contributors. You might want to talk to Red Hat Legal to check whether this is a possibility. It sounded more like a leap of faith than law but one can never assume laws to be logical.
Rahul