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Theia Re Licensing

Vincent Fugnitto edited this page Jun 18, 2019 · 1 revision

draft - needs review

Theia re-licensing

Motivation

Theia is in the process of becoming an Eclipse Foundation project, and will then be known as Eclipse Theia.

We will be squashing the history of the main Theia repository, theia-ide/theia, and moving the resulting repo under the Eclipse GH Organization. From what I understand, we will preserve the current's repo history, in a way to keep it available, but not immediately visible (hidden branch?). Since the GitHub repo will be moved, we will be able to preserve the issues, wiki and such, form the original project. However PRs and Issues that have links to specific commits might be broken, once we squash the history.

As far as we understand, it's not possible to move, to the Eclipse Foundation, code licensed under the Apache 2 license, like Theia currently is. Under Eclipse Cloud Development, two licenses are possible by default: EPL v1 and EDL. I do not remember the details (maybe someone else does?), but I know we first considered going with the EDL license, but then switched our preference to EPL v2 plus GPL v2 secondary license. See the attachment to this bugzilla for the reasons we preferred this vs EPL v1.

All this to say that we have to re-license Theia, before we can move to the Eclipse Foundation. Following the advice from the Eclipse Foundation, we understand that we need to gather permission from all current copyright holders, each for their respective contributions, in order to be legally allowed to keep those contributions, under the new license.

This page exists to explain and track this re-licensing process.

contributors

A raw list of all contributors to Theia can be obtained, running the following command on the latest master branch of theia-ide/theia :

git shortlog -sne

As of 2018-06-20, this is what we get:

   434  Anton Kosiakov <[email protected]>
   396  Akos Kitta <[email protected]>
   243  Sven Efftinge <[email protected]>
   135  Antoine Tremblay <[email protected]>
    92  akosyakov <[email protected]>
    83  Jan Bicker <[email protected]>
    83  Simon Marchi <[email protected]>
    78  Patrick-Jeffrey Pollo Guilbert <[email protected]>
    63  Alex Tugarev <[email protected]>
    41  Als <[email protected]>
    36  Miro Spönemann <[email protected]>
    26  Marc Dumais <[email protected]>
    24  Patrick Guilbert <[email protected]>
    21  Florent BENOIT <[email protected]>
    17  Antoine Tremblay <[email protected]>
    17  Jan Koehnlein <[email protected]>
    15  Paul Maréchal <[email protected]>
    14  Artem Zatsarynnyi <[email protected]>
    14  elaihau <[email protected]>
    13  Marc-Andre Laperle <[email protected]>
    13  Mykola Morhun <[email protected]>
    12  Patrick-Jeffrey Pollo Guilbert <[email protected]>
    11  Pierre GOUTAGNY <[email protected]>
    11  jbicker <[email protected]>
    10  Jacques Bouthillier <[email protected]>
    10  svenefftinge <[email protected]>
     9  guy perron <[email protected]>
     8  lmcgupe <[email protected]>
     7  Oleksii Orel <[email protected]>
     6  Anton Kosyakov <[email protected]>
     6  Simon Marchi <[email protected]>
     6  Tatsuyuki Ishi <[email protected]>
     6  Yevhen Vydolob <[email protected]>
     6  marcdumais-work <[email protected]>
     5  Gero Posmyk-Leinemann <[email protected]>
     4  Jacques Bouthillier <[email protected]>
     4  Oleksii Kurinnyi <[email protected]>
     4  William Enright <[email protected]>
     3  Alspaladin <[email protected]>
     3  Artem Zatsarynnyi <[email protected]>
     3  Gorkem Ercan <[email protected]>
     3  Jan Köhnlein <[email protected]>
     3  Lucas Sindra <[email protected]>
     3  Marc Khouzam <[email protected]>
     2  Guy Perron <[email protected]>
     2  Oleksandr Andriienko <[email protected]>
     2  Remy Suen <[email protected]>
     2  Tim deBoer <[email protected]>
     2  Vitaliy Gulyy <[email protected]>
     2  Vitaliy Gulyy <[email protected]>
     1  Akos Kitta <[email protected]>
     1  AlexTugarev <[email protected]>
     1  David Cummings <[email protected]>
     1  Igor Vinokur <[email protected]>
     1  Marc Khouzam <[email protected]>
     1  Marc-André Laperle <[email protected]>
     1  Miro Spönemann <[email protected]>
     1  Philippe Proulx <[email protected]>
     1  Stepan Samko <[email protected]>
     1  Vincent Fugnitto <[email protected]>
     1  Vitaliy Guliy <[email protected]>
     1  Vladyslav Zhukovskyi <[email protected]>
     1  WKnight02 <[email protected]>
     1  William Enright <[email protected]>
     1  Zate <[email protected]>
     1  hexa00 <[email protected]>
     1  jdhananjaya <[email protected]>

Contributors from TypeFox, Ericsson and Red Hat

We assume that the copyright of work done by people employed by the main companies behind Theia: TypeFox, Ericsson and Red Hat, is owned by the respective company. Also that blanket permission can be obtained, for the re-licensing of those contributions, from each. If that holds true, we will not need to ask permission from the individual contributors, from those companies. So we can remove from the raw list, those commits that have the following emails associated:

  • all commits done with a TypeFox, Ericsson or Red Hat / Codenvy email address

As well as commits from the following addresses:

Other individual contributors to seek permission from

The following command, to run on the root of the main Theia repo, with latest master branch checked-out, filters-out commits emanating from TypeFox, Ericsson and Red Hat, already covered in the previous sections. We need to get individual permission, from the contributors that are left, after that.

As of 2018-06-20, we obtain the following:

    11	Pierre GOUTAGNY <[email protected]>
     6	Tatsuyuki Ishi <[email protected]>
     3	Lucas Sindra <[email protected]>
     3	Marc Khouzam <[email protected]>
     2	Remy Suen <[email protected]>
     2	Tim deBoer <[email protected]>
     1	David Cummings <[email protected]>
     1	Philippe Proulx <[email protected]>
     1	Stepan Samko <[email protected]>
     1	WKnight02 <[email protected]>
     1	Zate <[email protected]>

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

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:

permissions status

Permission pending:

Permission obtained:

Permission denied:

  • none yet

Further action potentially needed: