Re:We Love GPLv3, but Are Switching License to Apache 2.0
by coddle-hark on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @07:08PM
(#25353487)
> If we had been moving to a proprietary license, I think it would have been harder to get sign off, but that is pure speculation!
Well good news for you then: There’s nothing stopping you making all future changes proprietary now that it’s Apache licensed. You can effectively relicense the project however you want now, attribution notwithstanding.
The contributors to the server & core, which is more challenging from a getting started perspective (prolog server and Rust triple store), have had fewer active outside contributors. I was looking at these slides (17 - 22 here: https://www.slideshare.net/slidarko/mmadt-a-virtual-machinea...) earlier in the week and remarked on how few devs actually worked on most of the major DB and OSS projects. Tinkerpop is effectively written by 1.5 people! But that largely tallies with our experience. Small number of focused devs keeping a lot of the architecture in their heads while they write the code.
Those that did contribute, and we are eternally grateful to them, were happy to allow their code to be re-licensed. But I wrote to all individually and waited until they had time to think before taking any other steps. If we had been moving to a proprietary license, I think it would have been harder to get sign off, but that is pure speculation!