Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 31/12/14 08:29 PM, Engel Nyst wrote:
> 
>> Projects that don't have such an agreement in place are
>> effectively stuck on a particular license for the rest of time.
>> That's a situation I'd like to avoid.
> 
> That's an understandable reason, but it has solutions, other than 
> copyright assignment. Apart from what was said here already (you
> can just use AGPLv3 or later),

The AGPL didn't exist a few years ago. Current license or later would
not have been sufficient to adopt it.

> look at it the other way around too: maybe keeping the license they
> chose (i.e. AGPLv3 or AGPLv3+) will be exactly what authors want.

The authors (in the copyright sense) are contributors to a project
with a clearly stated purpose. As contributors presumably they want
the project to pursue its stated aims over time as well as possible.
Changing the license may be the best way of doing that.

> Relicensing might be a wanted or unwanted thing, and you don't know
> unless you ask the community anyway before you do it - if you ever
> will in the future.

It depends on the relicensing. I agree about the value of community
discussion, though.

> In addition, even FSF doesn't ask for assignment for all projects, 
> only some who started that way many years ago.

There are more recent projects that take assignment.

The FSF emphasizes copyright (and thereby license) enforcement as
their reason for taking assigments:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

- - Rob.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJUpLZXAAoJECciMUAZd2dZmKAH/iW6wWkLkiz19pByeph8KBLP
/3KGm05S6h0gtOaqswGYW4zK9SEPanmVdOTdpNNc24MZb2bAoiYZtMDSJ5BH28Wv
DpxdIh3x1FMUVmxnJXTbEfN5/rDXUvBcm9pkDAXbZg/xL1ZiErHGKP4Tvsao5K6+
2vROaK7PQr1oy1QFX8iGj9GQxKSyF9zY1o9QHvJ5kulEzxXfD4Rdd9WB4Z5mGpX8
gqG8OOxJ1xSNmJTpwItR7mOb9hHlP4hLkH6RwSX4WV28T6rx8hAa7Vty0A5huSSK
Rzbl8KY+m5YCZsLCeeRVri7GBus/155dlzHi9U2aO4IqsPzKKu5yVB5CZYaEKx0=
=V6Q/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----