[darcs-users] carrying license information?

[Isaac Jones]

Greetings!

I have no doubt that when users send patches to me, they agree with
the license contained in my source tree.  However, IANAL and have no
idea if it's actually legally the case that they are agreeing.

Would it be a good idea for darcs to carry license information, just
as it carries the email address of the upstream author, and then
prompt the user, during a 'darcs send' as to whether or not the user
is licensing their patch under the given terms, and perhaps whether
they sign copyright over to the upstream author[1].

Occasionally, it might be nice to be able to change the license terms
of a piece of software; to upgrade to a new version of the GPL, or to
shift to the LGPL when a program becomes useful as a library.  This is
a practical difficulty, however, as license terms are held by a large
number of people.

There may be social advantages to not changing a license, but it might
be good to eliminate the technical ones by allowing contributers to
specify the precise terms on which they're offering the code over to
the upstream author.

Just a thought.


peace,

  isaac

[1] This can be made non-annoying by offering to memorize the choice
for future sends.