[openssl-dev] License change agreement

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Friday, March 24, 2017 12:30 PM -0700 James Bottomley 
<James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com> wrote:


>> Probably illegal and definitely immoral, in my opinion. Copyright law
>> exists to protect authors from these kind of practises.
>
> I think you misunderstand the legal situation.  Provided notice is
> sufficiently widely distributed and a reasonable period is allowed for
> objections it will become an estoppel issue after the licence is
> changed, which means anyone trying to object after the fact of the
> change will have to get a court order based on irreperable harm and
> show a good faith reason for not being able to object in the time
> period allowed.  In the US, this sort of notice plus period for
> objection is standard for quite a few suits and the range of things
> which qualify as "good faith reason" are correspondingly very limited.

It's not clear to me that that's correct.  From 
<http://blogs.fsfe.org/ciaran/?p=58> (See update), it appears you need an 
explicit 95% permission rate to legally relicense and zero objections.  So 
far one objection has already surfaced.

--Quanah

--

Quanah Gibson-Mount
Product Architect
Symas Corporation
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP:
<http://www.symas.com>