How should we go about making the change? Is it enough if everyone just
responds to this list? Or do we need something more formal like David
Ham suggests?
Can you reiterate what he suggested.
I can reiterate what he suggested ;).
In essence, if you write code as part of your job, your employer owns
the copyright, not you. The Fluidity project handles this by requiring a
copyright licensing letter from every individual contributor and from
the copyright department at their institution. The Institution letter says:
CONSENT TO COPYRIGHT LICENSING UNDER THE LGPL
On behalf of name of <commercialisation organisation> I hereby give my
consent to the redistribution and/or modification of <name of
university> contributions to the Fluidity/Imperial College Ocean Model
project under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the
License, or (at each distributor's option) any later version.
The individual letters say essentially the same thing with the obvious
changes.
To be really safe in terms of knowing that you absolutely, legally do
have the right to distribute under a given licence, I think you need to
do something like that. However you might also take the position that as
long as the individual contributors are happy, the universities will be
too. Imperial is very mercenary so I wouldn't take that for granted but
your institutions might be more enlightened.
Regards,
