Re: Can I use CRoaring library in Git?

From: Abhradeep Chakraborty <chakrabortyabhradeep79@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 21, 2022, 14:57 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPOJW5zA1FnLDWXgRza3WLCHK0ER7ZUkdyq-kcPm4-TsW9U2nA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <220721.86r12etvly.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 7:29 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> It's great that the primary author of the library wants to release it
> under a compatible license.
>
> But I feel like I'm missing something here, don't we still need the
> other contributors to that code to sign off on such a license change,
> and for us to be comfortable with integrating such code?

As far as I see their commits, they don't use sign-off in any of their commits. I know what you want to mean but the license text uses "The CRoaring authors" rather than "Daniel Lemire". Below is the text -

    /*
    * MIT License
    *
    * Copyright 2016-2022 The CRoaring authors
   *
   * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
   * person obtaining a copy of this software and associated
     ...
   */

So, isn't it enough for us?

Show 13 quoted lines

> My understanding (again, not a lawyer and all that) is that such
> transitions happen one of a few ways:
>
>  A. One entity had been assigned copyright in the first place, and can
>     re-license the work. E.g. the FSF requiring copyright assignments
>     for anything non-trivial.
>
>  B. The license itself has an "upgrade" clause (e.g. GPLv2 "or later"
>     projects being GPLv3 compatible).
>
>  C. All copyright holders (or near enough) agree to
>     relicense. E.g. OpenStreetMap went through this process at some
>     point.

I got your point here. I am sure that "All copyright holders" have no problem with this relicensing.

Daniel already said in his comment[1] that they do not have any problem with it.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/roaring-bitmaps/c/0d7KoA79k3A/m/t8e09-wPAgAJ

Thanks :)