Hacker superstitions about software licensing
<p>Hackers have a lot of odd superstitions about software licensing.  I was reminded of this recently when a project maintainer asked me whether he needed to get a sign-off from each and every one of his contributors before switching from Apache v1 to Apache v2.  Here&#8217;s  what I told him:</p>
<p>My opinion is this.  Under U.S. law &#8212; and I believe European codes are not different in this respect, because both are controlled by the Berne convention &#8212; a license change on a collection is grounds for protest or legal action only if the rights of the contributors are materially affected by the change.  That is, a court would have to be persuaded that the change caused a monetary loss or at least damage to a contributor&#8217;s public reputation.  If there is no such possibility, then there is no harm and no grounds for complaint.</p>
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<p>It is clear that there is such a claim when a license is changed from open source to proprietary, or from proprietary to open source, without the author&#8217;s consent (the legal categories that apply are &#8220;unjust enrichment&#8221; and perhaps &#8220;conversion&#8221;). But no such claim can plausibly be made about Apache v1 to v2.  A court would laugh at you if you tried.  The applicable rule in English and American common law is called &#8220;De minimis non curat lex&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;The law does not concern itself with trifles.&#8221;</p>
<p>I think the closest an open-source license change might come to meeting the &#8220;materially-affected&#8221; test would be a change from an infectious license like GPL to a non-infectious one.  Even that, I think, is doubtful.</p>
<p>Hackers have some weird superstitions in this area &#8211; they behave as though they think modifying a license even trivially is some sort of soul-stealing evil voodoo against the person who attached it, and they think the law treats license attachments as sacred and immutable.  It doesn&#8217;t &#8211; certainly not for collective works.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m telling you that you may have gone beyond what the law requires by asking about the GPL-to-Apache-v1 license change, and you are <em>certainly</em> beyond it in worrying about Apache v1 to v2,</p>
<p>I think you did right in respecting hacker customs by going beyond the law in the first case, but to worry about the second would be excessive.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Yes, the maintainer had previously changed the project from GPL to Apache v1.  Then, another project that he wanted to amalgamate code with switched to Apache v2.</p>
