11 ms·

VLC did a relicense a few years ago and it required them to contact 300+ contributors (!) and even stalk a few of them IRL in order to get in touch with them. N

VLC did a relicense a few years ago and it required them to contact 300+ contributors (!) and even stalk a few of them IRL in order to get in touch with them. Nobody wants to go through this pain… Part 1: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project/ https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o... Part 2: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-2/ https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o... Part 3: https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-3/ https://jbkempf.com/blog/how-to-properly-relicense-a-large-o...

coldpie 3y ago
In my opinion, they went way above what was required. A lot of that pain was self-inflicted. In all of that work, they didn't have a single person object to the license change. I feel confident saying that there are zero people who meet all of these requirements to cause a real problem: 1) contributed enough code to genuinely have a copyright claim, 2) are still alive, 3) are not easily contactable, and 4) care enough about their contribution to file a legal claim over it. IMO they could have stopped after the emails and a quick look through the remaining unaccounted-for code for any genuinely significant contributions. They didn't need to go hunt down one guy who changed two characters in a comment ("Quite a few people were surprised that I would mail them ('I only wrote one small commit', 'This was minor code').").