Re: relicensing Sparse

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 01:39:08PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 04:09:39PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 01:08:06AM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> > > All of you probably know that I've been contacting people to try get
> > > permission to relicense Sparse to the MIT license.  The Transmeta
> > > code was relicensed some years ago but we needed to collect all
> > > the copyright holders to do a full relicense.  I basically did a git
> > > blame and if you have over 10 lines of Sparse code, then I sent you
> > > an email.
> > 
> > Thank you very much for your continued effort on this.  I'd wondered
> > what still blocked that effort.
> > 
> > Checking "git blame" doesn't seem sufficient; I think you really want to
> > contact anyone who has a commit in the git log. Try "git shortlog -se".
> > Who appears on the latter list and not your list from "git blame"?
> 
> Most of the people who I missed would have been filtered out anyway
> by my ten lines of code minimum contribution requirement.  Perhaps I
> should just contact everyone.
> 
> I looked at how Mozilla did the relicensing and they pretty much went
> by who had their name in a copyright notice at the top of the file.
> For files without a copyright notice they looked at the history.  So
> it seems like tiny contributions were ignored.
> 
> I'm obviously not a lawyer.  Contacting everyone is probably doable
> if that's what you think is best.

I don't necessarily think you *have* to successfully contact everyone,
but trying seems worthwhile.  When the list gets short enough, we can
review the remaining contributions and figure out if we need to worry.

Nonetheless, I certainly think you've taken the right approach of
focusing on the major contributions first.

- Josh Triplett