Posted by chrissearle@dru... on January 1, 2009 at 1:08pm
After reading thru the CVS pages and licensing FAQ's - there's one thing I'm not clear on (this is more a general question rather than a drupal one).
If you have a drupal module licensed under Apache 2.0 it can't go in since that is not GPLv2 compatible - that I understand.
But - as the copyright holder - can such a license just be switched? Where no others have contributed - can I just switch out Apache 2.0 to GPLv2 ?
Would it have to apply for a given version and on (the version where the license changed) ?
I'd like to apply for an account and to move a module in - but before I do that I need to sort out the licensing ;)
Comments
Sole author
If you are the sole copyright holder to the code, then you can change the license whenever you like or even offer it under multiple licenses at the same time if you wish. That is, of course, subject to the restriction of the module being a derivative work of Drupal and therefore must be GPL compatible to begin with, which Apache license is not.
If there are multiple copyright holders, then all of them must agree in order to change the license or multi-license it.
So in your case, yes, strip out all references to the Apache license, submit the code to CVS, and it gets released through d.o under GPLv2+, and all is right with the world.
Technically you can go back and make older versions available under a new license as well, but in this case I suspect it's not worth the effort and as long as you don't distribute them anymore (since Apache 2 and GPL 2 are not compatible) then everything should be fine.
Thanks
Thanks for the info. Yes - I am the sole author - so this should be OK. I'll get the switch done tonight ;)
Just a quick caveat to
Just a quick caveat to Crell's explanation...
The Apache 2 license is perpetual and irrevocable, so anyone who's already obtained/using your code under the Apache license may continue to do so even after you've changed to GPL.
i.e. if you release:
software version 1 under Apache2 license, and
software version 2, under GPL
then someone can still make derivative works based on software v1 under the Apache2 terms. They'll only be bound to GPL if they base something on software v2.
If you go back and change software v1 license to GPL, then someone can still make derivative works based on software v1 under the Apache2 license, since it is perpetual and irrevocable.
Yes - that was my understanding of it
I'm not aware of anyone having downloaded the pre-GPL code - but if they have then they are more than welcome to continue to use it as Apache 2 licensed code :) I wouldn't have changed the license apart from the fact that to have it in drupal contrib requires GPL. However - if anyone has older pre-GPL copies - then that's also fine by me ;)