[tz] Use or Apply for SPDX Licence

Tom Lane tgl at sss.pgh.pa.us
Tue Jun 23 02:51:45 UTC 2020


"Philip Paeps" <philip at trouble.is> writes:
> Unfortunately, I don't think it's practical to retroactively apply a CC0 
> tag.  Formally, you'd need each individual contributor to agree.  Given 
> the age of the tz project, this may be impossible.

Yeah, that.

FWIW, we've had roughly comparable discussions in the Postgres project.
The existing PG copyright is a mess: it's sloppily worded and it
protects nobody except the University of California.  But we've
concluded that changing it is effectively impossible, because there's
no way to get the concurrence of every past contributor.  And that
conclusion was arrived at in 2000 ... so it'd be that much worse now.

In practice, the amount of interest in changing the license wording has
dropped to about nothing since 2000, too.  People are far more used to
the concept of community-owned open source code than they were then,
and the fact that the governing document is loosely phrased bothers
nobody now other than perhaps some bean-counters.

In short, I think politely ignoring SPDX is the right thing to do.
It's trying to solve a problem that was real enough twenty years
ago, but people have gotten over it.

			regards, tom lane


More information about the tz mailing list