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Re: Who's maintaining CVS


On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 06:43:30AM -0600, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 03:42, Jani Monoses wrote:
> > 
> > I will probably not sign such an assignment,sorry.If anyone is interested
> > I can place all my contributions from now on in the public domain (where 
> > possible) so anyone with signed papers can legally take them and submit them
> > as their own.This goes for the lwIP port too.
> > 
> 
> Does this mean that you are not willing to assign your work at all?  Or
> that you are not willing to assign copyright to Red Hat?  Would you be 
> willing to assign the copyright to some detatched organization, such as 
> the FSF?  Where does your reluctance lie?
> 
> Accepting code where the copyrights are not clear may endanger the
> future of eCos which is why we insist on them.  [The current status
> where there are multiple copyrights on certain files is expected to
> be only temporary]

I believe that it is not a requirement that the Copyright be centralized 
in one organisation. It makes it easier to defend the Copyright against
someone violating the license, but a distributed Copyright, does not
reduce the Freedoms of the users to use the work, as long it is licensed
under a uniform license, giving this freedom to use the work to the users.
On the otherhand, it gives more power to the central organization to
potentially abuse the centralized Copyright. FSF avoids this by strictly
stating in its Copyright Assignment that it will never fork the code to
a non-Free licensing scheme.

>From the FSF site, http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_7.html#SEC7:

  "If a contributor is reluctant to sign an assignment for a large change, 
   and is willing to sign a disclaimer instead, that is acceptable, so you 
   should offer this alternative if it helps you reach agreement. We prefer 
   an assignment for a larger change, so that we can enforce the GNU GPL 
   for the new text, but a disclaimer is enough to let us use the text." 

What is absolutely required is the certainty that the person that is
distribution code under this license or is signing a Copyright Assignment
is allowed to do so. Both distributing the code and signing a Copyright 
Assignment contract, will in both cases require the collaboration from the 
employer or customer if it is work-for-hire. Mere distribution looks as a 
smaller mistake than the Copyright Assignment because Copyright Assignment 
requires a signature and code distribution does not. But, they are both 
mistakes if the author did not have the rights to do that. This can lead 
to legal prcedures from an employer/customer against anyone using/distributing 
a Free Software program to claim that certain parts of the program are not 
legally distributed.

So, the debate should really concentrate on the question: "do we have a 
formal proof that the employer/customer of the developer agrees on paper with 
the distribution under a Free Software license of this code or that it is not
a work-for-hire and the developer has all the rights to publish or execute
a Copyright Assignment." Or otherwise said, in many cases, we do not need 
the signature of the code developer, but of his boss/customer. The exception 
is when code is written in the developer's own Free time. However, in the 
embedded scene, there is quite a lot of professional development 
(work-for-hire), so we should be very careful here.

We invested effort to get such copyright assignment contracts signed from a 
number of European corporations. It is not easy, but it is possible to 
convince customers that they should allow the early publication of certain 
pieces of generic code.

Peter Vandenabeele

> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Gary Thomas                  |
> eCosCentric, Ltd.            |  
> +1 (970) 229-1963            |  eCos & RedBoot experts
> gthomas@ecoscentric.com      |
> http://www.ecoscentric.com/  |
> ------------------------------------------------------------

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