The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Sean Kelly]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Tango as a project don't have copyright. It is kept by the individual
>> contributors.
>>
> 
> wouldn't it be better that Tango as a project would own the copyright
> for all the code?
> In case that the project wants to change the license or give someone
> specific permission to the code base (like Walter asks for) that would
> be easier to accomplish by the Tango's maintainers. in the current state
> of affairs you need to contact each contributer and get his personal
> approval.

Although the contributors retain copyright to their contributions they 
still must agree to place their code under the Tango license.  This has 
never been an issue for us in the past, but then no one has ever asked 
us to change our license before :-)


> Linux has the same policy and thus if Linus wants to move from GPLv2 to
> v3 he can't since he needs approval of all the thousands of contributers
> to the Linux kernel, some of which are dead.

It's a good point, though the current Tango license is so loose that I 
don't foresee us ever needing to change it.  All the artistic license 
requires is basically that the author information not be removed from 
the source code.  That's as close to Public Domain as you can get 
without actually being Public Domain.

> Of course, the sooner such a move is decided upon the easier it'll be to
> accomplish. Linux, for example, cannot change the license without
> talking to the dead or reimplementing parts of the code.

Definitely.


Sean