Skip to content

Re licensing theia ide theia website

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Marc Dumais edited this page Jan 27, 2021 · 12 revisions

Re-licensing theia-ide/theia-website

Motivation

The Theia framework is an Eclipse Foundation project. We believe that it would be beneficial to move, under the Eclipse Foundation, some of the peripheral repos that have grown under the theia-ide GH organization, that are related to Theia. Among these is theia-ide/theia-website:

License: no stated license. Root package.json mentions "MIT":

e5cc7026 (nisarhassan12 2019-08-23 07:17:20 +0000 4) "license": "MIT",

However this mention of a license was added when the repo already had quite many commits and presumably is not retroactive. So I think relicensing the repo to the same License as Eclipse Theia will be necessary, and will require permission from rights holders.

contributors

A raw list of all contributors to the repo can be obtained, running the following command on the latest master branch of the repo:

git shortlog -sne

As of 2020-10-05, this is what we get:

$ git shortlog -sne
    36  Nisar Hassan Naqvi <syednisarhassan12@gmail.com>
    33  nisarhassan12 <syednisarhassan12@gmail.com>
    32  Sven Efftinge <sven.efftinge@typefox.io>
    26  Jan Koehnlein <jan.koehnlein@typefox.io>
    20  Jan Keromnes <jan.keromnes@typefox.io>
    15  Nisar Hassan Naqvi <46004116+nisarhassan12@users.noreply.github.com>
     6  vince-fugnitto <vincent.fugnitto@ericsson.com>
     3  Anton Kosyakov <anton.kosyakov@typefox.io>
     3  Florent BENOIT <fbenoit@redhat.com>
     2  Paul Maréchal <paul.marechal@ericsson.com>
     2  micellius <micellius@gmail.com>
     1  Akos Kitta <1405703+kittaakos@users.noreply.github.com>
     1  Akos Kitta <kittaakos@typefox.io>
     1  Ben Dover <3507758+Helianthella@users.noreply.github.com>
     1  Daniel Ku <danieltomasku@gmail.com>
     1  Florent Benoit <fbenoit@redhat.com>
     1  ImgBotApp <ImgBotHelp@gmail.com>
     1  Jan Keromnes <janx@linux.com>
     1  Marc Dumais <marc.dumais@gmail.com>
     1  Marc Dumais <marcdumais-work@users.noreply.github.com>
     1  Stefano Populin <tefapopulin@gmail.com>
     1  Vincent Fugnitto <vincent.fugnitto@ericsson.com>
     1  alainbernard <alain.bernard1224@gmail.com>
     1  gumi <git@gumi.ca>
     1  kriti-a <kriti.agarwal@typefox.io>
     1  svenefftinge <sven.efftinge@typefox.io>
     1  tstibbs <tstibbs@users.noreply.github.com>

Contributors from TypeFox, Ericsson, Red Hat

We assume that the copyright of work done by people employed by TypeFox, Ericsson and Red Hat is owned by the respective company. As copyright owners, these companies need to approve the re-licensing.

Typefox:

Ericsson:

Red Hat:

update: it has been determined, after discussion with Richard Fontana (Red Hat lawyer), that their contributions above does not contain IP, and so does not require permission to re-license.

update: the latest status is that we still require re-licensing permission for Red Hat's contributions. We are considering removing them if we can't get permission soon

Final update: re-licensing permission for Red Hat contributions has been obtained

Other individual contributors to seek permission from

The following command, to run on the root of the repo, with latest master branch checked-out, filters-out commits already covered above. We need to get individual permission, from the contributors that are left, after that.

git shortlog -sne | grep -i -v "@typefox.io\|@ericsson.com\|@redhat.com\|syednisarhassan12@gmail.com\|46004116+nisarhassan12@users.noreply.github.com\|1405703+kittaakos@users.noreply.github.com\|janx@linux.com\|danieltomasku@gmail.com\|marc.dumais@gmail.com\|marcdumais-work@users.noreply.github.com"

As of 2020-10-05, we obtain the following:

     2	micellius <micellius@gmail.com>
     1	Ben Dover <3507758+Helianthella@users.noreply.github.com>
     1	ImgBotApp <ImgBotHelp@gmail.com>
     1	Stefano Populin <tefapopulin@gmail.com>
     1	alainbernard <alain.bernard1224@gmail.com>
     1	gumi <git@gumi.ca>
     1	tstibbs <tstibbs@users.noreply.github.com>

Information about those contributors: Name, email used to contribute, GH profile, employment status currently reflected on GH, and list of contributions

Interesting case: this commit was done by a bot that optimized the repo's images. I assume this has no copyright impacts? update: see the result of Sharon's investigation below. No further action required for this item

Feedback from Sharon Corbett (sharon.corbett@eclipse-foundation.org):

A preliminary investigation indicates that https://github.com/dabutvin (Copyright (c) 2017 Dan Butvinik ) is the copyright holder of the code/content of Imgbot if I'm understanding correctly.

According to his GitHub repo License File, the content is subject to the MIT. As a result, I see no risk/issue in accepting this contribution under the MIT itself which allows for sublicensing...

Obtaining permission to re-license contributions

For contributions in the name of Ericsson, TypeFox and Red Hat, we will try to get blanket approval from the proper authorities within these companies.

For others, we plan use email to reach-out to individual contributors, to ask for permission to re-license their work. They can then accept or decline by replying to the email.

Emails sent

Permission pending:

  • None

For anonymized GitHub email addresses, we use issues such as #127

Permission obtained:

Permission denied:

  • none yet

Status: all done! Pending Done

Add a custom footer
Add a custom sidebar
Clone this wiki locally