On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 08:29:59PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I can understand that CMU wouold hold copyright to most things, under
> the work for hire doctrine.  But have their been code contributions from
> members of the community?   I am unaware of any CLA (which is good -
> they add friction and alienate some contributors), so I'd expect
> inbound=outbound licensing, which would mean CMU is not in a position to
> relicense.  But it of course depends on the details of those particular
> files, which should be clear from VCS history.

I did do a quick check in the git history and I'm the only person who
has ever touched any of the files in the coda/lib-src/rwcdb subtree. And
all of the work has been done during my CMU employment, which implies
that CMU holds full copyright to this particular part of the code.

But you are correct, there is no CLA for Coda contributions so most of
the Coda codebase is not (easily) relicensable because it would be
necessary to contact all contributors and have them sign off on any new
terms. This has been done before, the Coda version 5 release switched
the core code to GPLv2 and supporting libraries to LGPLv2, but that was
not easy and at the time there were considerably fewer external
contributions.

Jan