[kaffe] Changing license to GPL/LGPL/MPL ?

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Stuart,

Stuart Ballard wrote:
> Dalibor Topic wrote:
> 
>> Yes it is possible. You need to do as Mozilla did, and contact 
>> everyone, and get their permission.
> 
> 
> I thought that it was impossible to do this for Kaffe because the people 
> who bought Transvirtual's IP are known not to be interested, and 
> Transvirtual owns large chunks of the copyright?

That's about it, yes. The chunks for the class libs libs are diminishing 
due to the gradual  move to GNU Classpath, but the chunks of the VM core 
are firmly there :)

It's not impossible, but it may take some time digging through the paper 
trail left behind after Transvirtual's demise to find who holds what IP 
precisely, finding the relatives of Edouard G. Parmelan and so on.

If someone is really willing to go through all that, more power to them. 
I for one wouldn't object to tri-licensing my own few [1] bits I've 
written, but I don't speak for anyone else.  But I don't see how we 
could tri-license the code we have from third parties, for example. Or 
why Mozilla would like to bundle kaffe when we don't have a working 
plugin [2] yet :)

To me, it sounds like it would be a lot of work with little obvious 
benefit. But I've got no experience with the Mozilla switch, so take my 
comments with a few grains of salt.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] they really are just a few ocassional bits. I do merge a lot of 
stuff in from other sources, but I've hardly hacked on the core.
[2] Another can of worms: the kaffe-oji-plugin things is only MPL-d 
afaik. So you'd need to get the copryght holders of that thing to agree 
to tri-licensing it as well.