[openssl-dev] License change agreement

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2017-03-24 at 12:03 -0700, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> --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.

There's no legal basis for those figures (I think they're just
examples: Mozilla was happy with 95% but that doesn't mean everyone
else doing the same thing would have to gain 95%).  The more explicit
responses you get, the greater your case for having given proper
notice, but there's no case law that I'm aware of on the exact
percentages.

>   So far one objection has already surfaced.

This is a more compelling problem: if a contributor actively objects
within the notice period, the only real recourse is to rewrite their
code (or reason them in to acquiescence).

James