I wanted to give you an update on my previous email regarding the licensing requirements for the Windows Exporter project. I have opened a license exception request with the CNCF, which can be found at the following link:
https://github.com/cncf/foundation/issues/514 I will keep you all updated on any developments with this request. On 22 Dec 09:33, Stuart Clark wrote: > On 2022-12-22 09:09, Ben Kochie wrote: > > It was my understanding that license changes, can be done by the > > copyright holder, without consent of all contributors. Because they do > > not hold any copyright to the code. IIRC this is how Grafana was able > > to relicense from Apache to AGPL. They did not need to get consent > > from all contributors. > > > > Of course, old versions are subject to the old license, but moving > > from prometheus-community to prometheus would effectively be a fork. > > > > In this case we could do it with permission from the original author > > as stated in the LICENSE file. > > > > You are correct in saying that it is the copyright owner(s) who have to > agree to any license changes. > > However by default if you contribute something to a project you are now one > of the copyright owners (only to your contributed code, not the whole > thing). The original owner is nothing special (other than possibly being the > largest owner, because there might be more of their code than anyone else). > > The only way around this (which I assume Grafana did, and other projects > require) is when contributing you sign a copyright transfer agreement - that > way legally the person/organisation the contributors transferred ownership > to is the only owner, and they have the right to do anything they wanted > (including using the code commercially or making everything closed source). > > So if this happened, and there is a record of signed copyright transfers the > license could be changed just by the agreement of the one owner. Presumably > however that isn't the case, and therefore it isn't possible. > > Another option which has been used in other projects (such as the Linux > kernel for code that was found to not be correctly licensed [contributed by > someone who didn't have the rights to do so]) is to remove that code & > rewrite it (although you have to be careful that is is done 'cleanly' to > stop claims that you just copied that bad code). At that point the > contributor's code is no more, so no permission is then needed. If 95% of > existing contributors agreed to relicense and/or assign copyright but there > was 5% who didn't agree or couldn't be contacted that would potentially be > an option - of course it could be very difficult/impossible if the remaining > code was something really core. > > -- > Stuart Clark > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Prometheus Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/ecc14b37981ae722f6b7ca74203c67b9%40Jahingo.com. -- Julien Pivotto @roidelapluie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/ZAXJD3Eiqzm9Tqin%40nixos.
