[ksh93-integration-discuss] good news: contributions to ksh93 approved

[Casper.Dik at sun.com]

>On 1/17/07, Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer at sun.com> wrote:
>> >>>>> "WJ" == William James <williamjamesgnusolaris at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> WJ> What happens if I contribute something to Opensolaris as CDDL
>> WJ> code. Does this mean that everything could be contributed under
>> WJ> CPL1.0 to someone else?
>>
>> IANAL, but I believe that in the general case, the answer is "yes".  If
>> you contribute code directly to OpenSolaris, you must sign a joint
>> copyright assignment.  My understanding is that this gives Sun the
>> authority to distribute the code under a different license.  You, of
>> course, retain (joint) ownership of the code and can distribute it under
>> any license you choose.
>
>What happens if the existing license of the code is incompatible to
>the CDDL or GPLv3?

Doesn't matter; the copyright owner(s) can do what they want with the
code and its license.

If I write code and release it under the GPL, I can then later re-release
it under the BSD license or the CDDL or even stop publishing changes
I make; if, however, the code was modified by others and the copyright
was not assigned back to me, I cannot distribute those changes under
a different license.  I have no knowledge about the status of all GPLv2'ed
source code, but I can imagine that quite a few projects cannot change
their license, unless they kept track of source code changes.

(Come to think of it, I have suggested changes to gcc which were later
incorporated without ever signing off on copyright)

Casper