No license specified about maven-protoc-plugin HOT 7 CLOSED

Thanks for a kind reminder. It's one of the many things that I need to sort out before I can upload the plugin to Maven Central (and that's why I am keeping it here for now).

In summary, the situation is follows (if I myself understand the long history behind in correctly):

1. The original plugin was deleloped by Gregory Kick from Google and was available on a branch of protobuf project. As such, it must have been covered by "New BSD License", link:
   http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/source/browse/trunk/COPYING.txt
2. The branch was never merged into trunk for some reason. It was then taken over by David Trott and uploaded to GitHub 2 years ago: dtrott@dcf8f4e
3. A few other people contributed through pull requests.
4. Then I took over it on my fork, because our project needed my changes/fixes and David was too busy to merge my pull request.

IANAL, by my understanding is that if I am going to keep the project on GitHub, I can stick to the above liberal BSD licence, only extending "Copyright 2008, Google Inc." with an additional community copyright for the code that was added after taking the project over from Google. If I am going to promote the project to e.g. CodeHaus Mojo, I may need to relicense it under a dual Apache/BSD licence -- but that's something that needs to be clarified. If it comes to a legal deadlock, there's always an option to write a clean-room implementation.

from maven-protoc-plugin.

Would it make sense to go ahead now and stick to the BSD license? If you later decide to additionally license it under Apache, that should still be an option.

I can see changes I'd like to contribute (e.g. it would be nice to have the option to output generated python), but I'm hesitating because I don't know if I could then legally use the code. It makes me wonder if I might be best off forking the 2008 plugin that has clear license terms...I'd really rather do that though because as far as I can see, the changes since then have been good changes that I would rather not lose.

from maven-protoc-plugin.

Frankly speaking, I am more and more inclined to kick off a clean room implementation on clear licence terms. All the currently planned changes will require a pretty major refactoring of the entire plugin, and I think I can just as well start it afresh, retaining what's been done by me and Rob so far, and rewriting the rest. I reckon that "the rest" will amount to a very small portion of the current plugin's code.

from maven-protoc-plugin.

Hi @sergei-ivanov,

I would like to use this plugin in our project, but as there is no Licence we can't. Has anything changed in the last 3 years?

Thanks,
Nerses

from maven-protoc-plugin.

I am sorry to disappoint you, but unfortunately nothing really changed in that time: I haven't got resources for a clean rewrite, Google people haven't shown a commitment to adopt the project, CodeHaus dev community was not interested in it either.

from maven-protoc-plugin.

hiya - quick ping wrt to license. ping me on twitter @saturnism and let's chat.

from maven-protoc-plugin.

Hello all,

We managed to amicably resolve licensing issues with Google. The plugin has been licensed under Apache 2.0 licence, and it has a new home now:
https://github.com/xolstice/protobuf-maven-plugin

This repository will be locked down shortly. Please submit issues and pull requests to the new repository.

Thank you for your patience.
Kind regards,

Sergei

from maven-protoc-plugin.