Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Carl Sorensen]

On 9/10/09 4:02 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Mao, I missed the flamewar.  I'm very disappointed that this
> happened without me.  :(
> 
> 
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 06:04:17PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> 
> 3)  If we can't find some people, or if they don't agree to
> whatever relicense/assignment, then we eliminate their patches and
> rewrite that material.
> 
> This could involve a non-trivial amount of extra work, but at
> least it's legally sound.  This also gives you an order to ask
> people -- identify the most active / biggest contributors, and get
> them on board first.  If 95% of the code+docs is covered, then
> it's more feasible to undertake the project.  I mean, if worst
> comes to worst, we can just rewriting the stuff from the missing
> people.
> 

It seems to me that there's a very easy, low-risk way to get started on a
potential move to 2+ (or 3+):  First ask the current active developers if
they are willing to license their contributions under 2+.  If any are not,
then it's basically a dead end path, and there's no sense going down it
(although it may be beneficial to clean up copyright and license
statements).

Realistically, I see that there is no chance that somebody will sue over
LilyPond -- there's nobody with any assets and there is a long record
(archived in mail lists) of the public development of LilyPond.

The main reason for having the GPL, IMO, is to prevent somebody from taking
the LilyPond codebase and selling a proprietary package.  And v2 seems to do
that sufficiently well.

But if this is something that Joe is willing to take a stab at, I say good
for you, Joe.

Carl