[erlang-questions] License change

[Duncan McGreggor]

Changing licenses for open source projects is an incredibly cumbersome
process -- it takes a great deal of time. The kicker is, that to accord by
most open source licenses, one must contact every contributor who has ever
had patches committed. One is legally bound to be able to produce evidence
that all reasonable means were attempted to contact everyone, in the event
that some don't respond. (This is one of the reasons that some open source
projects opt to put copyright in the care of foundations or supporting
companies, so that changes need only be agreed upon by a smaller/governing
group and not everyone in the history of the project.)

An update was given at the EUC that a successful "trial run" was done a few
months back, where many folks were contacted to see if there were any
objections to a license change. No serious objections (if any) were
mentioned at the conference, and it sounded like they were going to start
working on the "real thing" soon (or already had?). Again, this will take
time because *everyone* has to respond (and extensive documentation of the
process has to take place in the event that not everyone does).

I'm sure members of the OTP Team have more (and more accurate!) details ...

OTP Team: I forget which license has been agreed upon. Was it Apache 2.0?

Hope this puts you at ease :-)

d

P.S. In general, it's probably a good idea to find out what is involved in
a given process before intimating that those involved in it might be lying
;-) One might also get more/better responses from others ...



On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 1:49 AM, <musicdenotation@REDACTED> wrote:

> In December 2013 I asked to change Erlang's license to MPL 2.0, and the
> response was that there was a plan to change the license. Why hasn't the
> license changed yet? Did the answerer lie?
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> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
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