Change of Licensing of the project is not possible

[ankostis]

@thecapacity In a72203a you change the GPL-v3 licensing of this project to Public-Domain.

IANAL, but I believe you are not entitled to that, although your motives are kind.

My understanding is this:

• You work under the US-gov, so all you code has to be in public-domain.
• Your additions are indeed in public domain, and you are ok with adding an exception in the LICENSE file.
• But on the derivative work, both licensing terms apply, but since GPLv3 is more "strict", it takes precedence.

Practically, the project has to remain under GPLv3 and not under the public domain.

[dgorissen]

Thank you @ankostis, this had slipped by me. This is indeed not correct.

[ankostis]

I also work under the European Commission, so I know these intricacies when submitting code to 3rdp projects :-)

[thecapacity]

Sorry - I definitely did not intend to change the pre-existing work. Honestly I was trying to set this up for work but the project did not continue (which is why I just saw this) so yea I was trying to explicitly state that Gov-issued work (e.g. by me) is public domain and CC0 1.0 (which I'm told we should do because public domain isn't interpreted the same globally)

Do you have a suggestion @ankostis on how I should revise?

[ankostis]

I believe that the guidelines from your department should be like "publish under CC 1.0 when possible", meaning that you should not violate any pre-existing license. As I explained, you are creating a "derived work", so you would be fine if you leave the project's license as it is, GPLed - your Gov can't complain for respecting the copyright law :-)

If you want to drive things to the extreme, you should create a new project, and add there ONLY the files that you added - but that won't be of much use to anybody.

[Immortalin]

@thecapacity you can re-license https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4481/as-owner-of-gpl-library-can-i-break-the-licensing-terms/4482

[ankostis]

Re-licensing is possible if you are the sole author (or if you got the permission from all authors), which i don't think this is the case here, correct?

[Immortalin]

Depends if the work belongs to the government as a whole.

[ankostis]

We're both telling the same thing.