infotroph
commented
2 weeks ago Text of the email we sent to all contributors whose addresses we could find:
Dear PEcAn contributor,
May we please have your permission to change the PEcAn license from “NCSA Open Source” to “BSD 3-clause”? Please respond and tell us yes or no!
We’re sending this message because you wrote some of the code or documentation in one or more PEcAn packages and therefore you hold* a piece of the PEcAn copyright, so we want your explicit consent before we change the license it is distributed under.
*(Well, probably. Determining who holds copyright is complicated and this is not legal advice. But it does for sure mean you get a say in this decision!)
Timeline: Please answer now! If you agree, replying with the word “yes” is enough.
If you disagree, please tell us and we’ll do our best to address your concerns and find a resolution. We will resolve all contributor concerns before changing the license.
If we haven’t heard from you in a week, we’ll assume the email address we had for you is out of date and move on to hounding you in a different channel... ;)
FAQ:
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To what specifically am I agreeing? If you respond “yes, I agree”, you are giving us permission to change the license of all your contributions to PEcAn from the NCSA Open Source license to the BSD 3-clause license. We will ask you once and keep your answer on file, then refer to it to relicense each individual PEcAn package when all its contributors have signed off on the change. It may take some time for all the packages to update — we need to track down some contributors who have not been in regular touch for some time.
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What’s the difference between the old and new licenses? Both licenses are very similar — see the links above for their exact text. NCSA is more explicit about what parts (software and documentation) it covers and what rights the user has, but both licenses are identical in the uses they allow.
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If they’re so similar, why change? We initially used the NCSA license because we liked the more explicit user rights, but few other projects have adopted it and the BSD3 license is now more widely recognized. One big motivation for this change is that we would like the option of submitting the PEcAn R packages to CRAN, which will require us to choose from a list of standard licenses that includes BSD3 but not NCSA.
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How did you decide to ask me? We ran
git shortlog -se —allin the PEcAn Git repository and found your name there. Even if your involvement was just one commit long ago, we still consider you a PEcAn contributor and we want your agreement for this change. -
Didn’t you just hassle me about this in Slack? Yes. Sorry for the repeated messages, but if you’re reading this it means we haven't yet seen an answer from you in any medium.
Thank you again for being part of PEcAn, and we look forward to your response.
For the whole team,
Rob Kooper, Mike Dietze, David LeBauer, Chris Black
JoshuaPloshay
shubhamagarwal92
hangyakuzero
kzarada
aabaris
marissakivi
bailsofhay
andydawson
rykelly
jsimkins2
gsrohde
helge22a
If you are tagged below: Do we have your permission to switch PEcAn's open source license from NCSA to BSD-3? If so, please comment "yes" below.
Both licenses are very similar, but BSD 3-clause is more widely recognized, importantly including being on the list of licenses CRAN will accept. We assume by default that every PEcAn contributor retains copyright on their contributions, so we want consent for this change from ALL PEcAn contributors. You can agree once here and we will use it for each PEcAn package you have code in.
Many, many authors are not tagged here because they have already given their consent by Slack or email -- thank you for your responses thus far!