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Release
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General Topic
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General Topic
- TSC Special Election self-nomination period will end today at 5PM PT.
- Community Meeting Calendar
- License Update
- Steve Winslow to speak to TSC on
Pursuant to OpenDaylight's technical charter [1] and its predecessors, prior contributions have been made to OpenDaylight under EPL-1.0. In order for the project to change its license, one of the following would likely need to be true:
either the new license needs to be "compatible" with the old license, so that the license change can be done within the scope of the rights previously granted to the project by contributors; OR
copyright holders of the prior contributions to the project would need to approve the relicensing under the new license.
Additionally, in either case, it would be necessary for the project to amend its IP policies in its technical charter to reflect the new license.
EPL-2.0:
For EPL-2.0, based on the Eclipse Foundation's view on this topic, a change from EPL-1.0 to EPL-2.0 should be permissible without needing explicit consent from all copyright holders. The Eclipse Foundation's FAQs at [2] explain their reasoning on this, based on the EPL-1.0 including a clause that essentially permits "upgrading" to newer versions of EPL released by the Eclipse Foundation.
So if the community wanted to change to EPL-2.0, according to the license steward's views, this should be possible without requiring consent from all existing copyright holders. The main precursor that would need to happen would be for ODL to formally amend its IP policy in its technical charter, to reflect that EPL-2.0 would be the project's license going forward. After that change, the code notices could be updated as described in the Eclipse FAQs.
Regarding why a change to EPL-2.0 may be helpful: the Eclipse Foundation has indicated that they updated the EPL to improve clarity and better reflect the norms for open source use and development today. A short highlight of some of the key changes is in their FAQs at [3]. In particular, I'd say that changing references from "modules" to "files" improves clarity quite a bit and makes it easier for users of EPL-2.0 code to understand what their obligations are.
Apache-2.0:
A change to Apache-2.0 would likely be more challenging. Since EPL-1.0 is understood to be a "weak copyleft" license, content contributed under EPL-1.0 presumably cannot be relicensed under Apache-2.0 without the consent of the copyright holders, e.g. the original contributors and/or their employers.
So to do this, you would likely need to obtain that consent -- or, for any holdouts, to remove their contributed content from the relicensed repo. I'm happy to talk through some of the operational ways to manage obtaining these consents. But be aware that, for a longstanding project like ODL, this is likely to be a significant undertaking -- and can end up being disruptive to the community, especially if there are participants who object to moving from the longstanding "weak copyleft" model of EPL to a more "permissive" Apache license. The project would want to carefully consider the likely effort, timing and impact before moving in this direction.
[1] https://www.opendaylight.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2018/01/ODL-Technical-Charter-LF-Projects-LLC-FINAL.pdf, see section 7(b)(i) and (b)(iii)
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#epl-relicensing -- note that it would be the change to EPL-2.0 described in section 3.1 of the FAQs, not "EPL-2.0 with Secondary License" as described in 3.2
[3] https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#h.a0eux401qus
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