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Re: [ECOS] Re: eCosCentric copyright hold in headers
- From: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>
- To: Alex Schuilenburg <alexs at ecoscentric dot com>
- Cc: Andrew Lunn <andrew at lunn dot ch>,eCos Maintainers <ecos-maintainers at ecos dot sourceware dot org>
- Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:02:00 +0100
- Subject: Re: [ECOS] Re: eCosCentric copyright hold in headers
- References: <20040408101602.GJ29940@lunn.ch> <4075305D.8020101@eCosCentric.com> <20040408111939.GK29940@lunn.ch> <407556D4.8080407@ecoscentric.com>
[ Moved to maintainers list ]
Alex Schuilenburg wrote:
Andrew Lunn wrote:
[...]
Yep. It should all get blasted away when the FSF assignment happens
(don't ask).
Which is my i asked. We should keep track of this just in case...
and for the benefit of all...
When I asked them face-to-face last week at ESCW, Red Hat were unable to
provide a date when the actual assignment to the FSF would happen.
Apparently everything has passed through legal and it is now a matter of
waiting for their engineer to become available to actually make the
assignment and header changes.
We could offer to do the changes for them but would need legal-sign off
from someone in Red Hat for all the files that would have their
copyright changed. If we are going to help make this happen, I suggest
we provide Red Hat with a list of all the eCos files for which they hold
copyright and have them approve the list (in writing). We can then make
the copyright changes and assignments to the FSF (including eCosCentric
and other maintainer held copyrights) in one go, which would make a lot
of sense.
I'd have hoped we wouldn't have to be responsible for that. While we could
search for the copyright banner in files, I can't guarantee every file
contains a Red Hat copyright that should have (even from the days when
we^H^HRed Hat were working on eCos). And for the files without a Red Hat
copyright banner, it would need careful identification to work out whether
they are Red Hat's or someone elses (or indeed are mostly someone elses but
may contain portions of RH code thus making it a derived work). The
consequences of us making a mistake with the identification is painful; but
if Red Hat makes the mistake it's nowhere near as bad and I believe intent
does matter a lot in these circumstances.
It would be much much nicer if Red Hat could arrange some sort of blanket
assignment, perhaps just by reference to the contents of the entire eCos
CVS repository at ecos.sourceware.org. Or perhaps just list every
repository file, irrespective of copyright and finetune the wording of the
assignment so that it assigns any right and title that _may_ belong to Red
Hat in the listed files. I'm no lawyer though. I'd be more than willing to
talk to them about ways it could be done though..... if they'll talk to me!
Jifl
--
eCosCentric http://www.eCosCentric.com/ The eCos and RedBoot experts
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine