D library projects : adopting Boost license

[Janzert]

dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from Yigal Chripun (yigal100 at gmail.com)'s article
>> On 13/11/2009 20:51, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> This is very important IMO, probably as important as the license itself.
>> This is exactly why the GNU project rejects contributions even if they
>> are licensed under the GPL unless the the contributer agrees to give
>> ownership of the copyright to the FSF (the legal entity for the GNU
>> project).
>> Almost all open source projects do the same. a notable exception is the
>> linux kernel and I think this influenced the decision to not upgrade to
>> GPL3.
>> Does that mean that all of Phobos is under one legal entity - Digital
>> Mars I presume? If not, than it really should be and you should require
>> the same policy for future contributions.
>> I don't want to see each module licensed under a different person
>> (Andrei, Sean, You, etc..).
> 
> I personally would have a hard time giving the copyright up for stuff that I
> worked on without pay.  I don't mind licensing it permissively, but the idea that
> it's even possible (even if it's not likely) for someone to prevent me from
> relicensing subsequent versions own code under whatever terms I want bothers me.
> For example, let's say that (hypothetically, not that this has any chance of
> happening) that Digital Mars switched to GPL for Phobos.  If I had given them the
> copyright to my code, I wouldn't be able to keep the stuff I wrote permissively
> licensed.

While I believe it's true the FSF does require taking ownership[1], this
is by no means universal for large open source projects. The two I'm
semi-familiar with and could find fairly quickly are the agreements for
Apache and Python.

The Apache Software Foundation agreement[2] grants the foundation a
"perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,
irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your
Contributions and such derivative works".

Similarly the Python Software Foundation agreement[3] gives the
foundation "the irrevocable and perpetual right to make and distribute
copies of any Contribution, as well as to create and distribute
collective works and derivative works of any Contribution".

So while both allow them to relicense the contributions they do not take
the copyright ownership from the original author.

Janzert

[1] The closest I could find for the FSF's contributor agreement was
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html which states that they
require a copyright assignment but I don't see the actual agreement
anywhere.

[2] http://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas

[3] http://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form-python/