Re: Re NickHolland
Grow up. Not all open source contributors are snot nosed 20-somethings.
Possibly not the best opener, but go on...
A good fraction of the non-respondents are going to be from people who are deceased, retired, disinterested, suffering from dementia, etc who can't or won't respond.
This is a good point, and one lesson that should be learnt by all open source projects, especially if you're planning a licence change. When you take code from other people, they may drop off the radar, lose interest, go mad or die; which means you may at some point have to rewrite their code.
Setting up a proxy vote system where a only deliberate 'no' vote counts as 'no' and everything else counts as support for management's decision is standard and legal. It is the structure of shareholder voting systems for publicly traded companies..
..and for a company, especially a publicly traded one this is correct. However that's an entirely different situation from a piece of open source software made up from the work of disparate contributors.
If I contribute some code under a given licence, and you wish to change that licence but are unable to get my permission then you have to replace the code. That's it. I may not be interested, I may be barking at the moon or I may even be dead, but I also may just not have seen your email or have moved address; or decided to live in a tent in the outback, which doesn't mean I don't care. You may not like it and it might prove to be an insurmountable logistical burden for a project but you can't just ignore licence terms because you feel like it. To do so is just putting yourself at risk of legal issues further down the road.
What if I return from my 5 year voyage of personal discovery in the outback even grumpier than ever and discover you've relicensed my code without my consent.... It'll be lawyer time....
You only have to look to the entertainment industry for many examples of this.