[Savannah-register-public] [task #10626] Submission of ESPResSo

[Olaf Lenz]

Follow-up Comment #4, task #10626 (project administration):

Hi Alex,

In no way I wanted to suggest that you have been too slow or anything with my
comment, it was more that I had hoped that all contributors to ESPResSo
(including me) had worked such that submitting it to Savannah would work "out
of the box". Well, we didn't.

To be able to go on with adapting ESPResSo to meet Savannah's requirements, I
would like to ask a few things. The problem is that we are scientists, and all
that legal stuff is pretty alien to us. We are willing to do it right, but we
might need some help. I have tried to find answers to my questions at
different places (e.g. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html), but I got
lost in the legal jungle and didn't find what I was looking for.

We still know all contributors, and we can reconstruct who has done what on
each file, as we have been using a VCS from the very start. However, not all
of the contributors can be easily contacted. One of them has actually died,
others are also pretty much out of our scope.

We (i.e. the ESPResSo core team) now think that it would be nice to change
the license of ESPResSo to pure GPL instead of the modified version from
LICENSE.TXT. Is there a way to do this legally? 
I gather that it would be no problem if all contributors agree, and I'm
pretty sure that none of the contributors would disagree. However, we will not
be able to ask all of them. Is this a problem?

So far, the various files do not have copyright notices that specify
individual copyright owners. Instead, the copyright owner for that time seem
to be the "Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Theory Group". Of course
we have to retain this copyright notice in the future. 
As far as I understand, as the program was developed under the GPL (or the
slightly modified version) right from the start, this can not cause any
problem, even if the MPI would start to claim its copyright at some stage,
right? Or would it be better to get an explicit copyright disclaimer from the
institute? The institute fully agrees, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Finally I wonder what is the best thing to put into the copyright header in
the future. Does it really make sense that everybody who makes any
modification to any of the files adds himself to the copyright claim in the
top? Or can we put in the FSF or FSFE as copyright holder and like that
transfer the copyright? Or should we use something like "The ESPResSo team"?

I hope that you can help to make these things clearer to me, or maybe pass my
questions on. Or should I directly pose these questions to address@hidden 

Best regards
  Olaf


    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?10626>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via/by Savannah
  http://savannah.gnu.org/