Relicensing and/or donating code (was: JIRA and SVN)

[Leo Simons <ma...@leosimons.com>]

On 22-05-2005 00:49, "Robert Lougher" <ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The major problem with JamVM as regards Harmony is that it is
> currently licensed under the GPL.  I originally had some specific
> reasons for doing this, however, I am open to suggestions about
> different licensing models, e.g. dual-licensing, adoption of LGPL or a
> linking exception as in GNU Classpath.  Assuming the license issue
> could be sorted out,

By far the easiest and safest option for you if you would like Harmony and
JamVM to be "legally compatible" is probably to dual-license under both the
GPL and one of

 -> Apache License 2.0
 -> MIT/X11 License (basically revised BSD license)
 -> Mozilla Public License, CPL, or similar

If that is acceptable to you from a moral/philosophical/... point of view.

As for choosing "which one", IMHO (IANAL!) the main advantage of MIT is that
its real simple and short, the main advantage of AL over MIT is a little bit
of patent protection. The other big advantage of MIT license is that the FSF
feels it is compatible with the GPL whereas the same cannot be said for the
ASL, but if you're dual-licensing under the GPL as well that becomes a moot
point.

Then again, I don't reallly know why one would actually license under both
MIT license and GPL license: anyone could take your code, change 5 lines,
put those under the GPL, and the entire combined work would be under the
GPL, so you might as well just license under MIT license only. I think.

Then again, I have no idea why people whould choose MPL or CPL, but they do
that as well; IANAL.

> and if (and it's a big if) JamVM was adopted as
> one of the seed VMs my next concern would be what happens next. Would
> it be a fork?  Would I continue to work on JamVM as now?  Of course,
> change is not necessarily a bad thing.

Well, another alternative you can consider is donating JamVM to the ASF.
That would mean a code grant
(http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt). It would mean that
JamVM would become an integral part of harmony, you become one of Harmony's
committers (at least I'd hope so! But the two aren't necessarily coupled),
and the entire work is from that point on licensed under the AL, brought
into the ASF version control repositories, etc etc. Of course, bringing a
big piece of code into a project requires the project's PPMC to decide it
wants that to happen, its not something the donating party decides on its
own :-)

I'd say that's a lot bigger a change than merely changing the license or
starting to dual-license. Depends on what y'all want to do :-D

Of course it would then still be possible to keep developing JamVM on its
own as well under a license of your choice (ie the ASF version would then
become a fork of some sort) but I'd advise against that kind of deal since
it leads to duplication of effort.

Gnight!

Leo