Ant wrote on May 16, 2015, 17:27:
I was surprised it wasn't already under open source license.
As a project it operated quite closely to a regular open source project, in terms of allowing external code contributions, even without central copyright assignment. It's just that the license contributors agreed their code would be released under had a bunch of restrictions that made it fail to meet the open source bar, like disallowing commercial use.
Switching the license involved asking everyone with copyright on the code for consent. Having been involved in similar things in the past I'd be really curious to see the stats of how long that took and what percentage of the contributor base they were succesful in contacting. Considering the age of the project and what I'd expect to be a fair number of pairs of hands, it'd be remarkable if they didn't have any code left in limbo.