[openssl-project] Copyrights, AUTHORS file, etc.

[Salz, Rich]

For some background you can take a look at https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/5499 and the blog posts here: https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/categories/license/

The OMC voted in 2014 to work to an eventual change of license to Apache 2. That led to the CLA’s. We had calls with various open source folks who we thought could help us. This include Max Sills from the Google open source office, Gervais Markham who led the Mozilla relicensing effort, someone from GitHub (to talk about CLA automation), and probably another person who I am forgetting.  We also talked with our legal counsel, Mishi Choudhary of the Software Freedom Law Center.

Around 2Q 3Q 2015 the discussions were completed, and we had coalesced around a plan. There was no formal OMC vote (it was called the openssl-team at that point). But there were no objections.  OMC members can skim the archives, starting around July 2015 if they need to refresh their memories.

The key points of the plan are

  *   Move to Apache license
  *   Require CLA’s from all contributors
  *   Reach out to everyone we can identify and get them to approve of the change, or not
  *   Have a uniform copyright in all source files that points to the license and authors separately, for easier maintenance

The “removing some code” blog post gives more details about the scripts we developed and what code we removed. Since then, nobody else has asked for their code to be removed.

The file/copyright changes happened during the 1.1.0 release.

We’re on the verge of being able to change the license, and as we said in our last press release, we are hoping and planning to do that for 1.1.1

The PR that marks part of this has a -1 from Tim, which is a hold.  That means we have to discuss and the OMC vote on this.  This email is intended to give the background and start the discussion.

So what are your objections Tim, and what do you want to see done differently? And also, please explain why it is better than the current plan.

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