[ECOS] Who's maintaining CVS

[Jonathan Larmour]

Boy oh boy. What a long thread to have grown so quickly! Sorry that I'm 
about to make it worse, but I don't anyone to think that they're point is 
ignored.

Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 10:31:38AM -0400, Tim Drury wrote:
> 
>>Jani Monoses wrote:
>>
>>>>Jani and Thomas: have you guys already submitted this paperwork
>>>>to Redhat?  Jani, if you recall I used your Atmel at49xxxx flash
>>>
>>>
>>>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.
>>
>>Jani, is there any way we can convince you otherwise?  I cannot
>>send in my copyright assignment in good faith because I submitted
>>your at49xxxx flash driver.  If you do not want to turn over
>>copyright assignment to Redhat we probably need to pull the
>>patch and re-write it from scratch. [snip]
> 
> 
> Following the FSF directions, it seems perfectly OK to do it in two
> steps:
> 
> - Jani surrenders any interests in the code with the disclaimer
>   that answers the question:  "Would you be willing to sign a 
>   copyright disclaimer to put this change in the public domain, 
>   so that we can install it in program?" 
>   (from http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_7.html#SEC7)

Jani appears to have forgotten that he did even submit his lwIP changes, 
several months ago, using the very same principle, i.e. declaring the code 
is being put in the public domain. The maintainers know full well about 
this get-around :-).

Peter is right that this is acceptable *however* we do not want to permit 
this as the usual course of action. For a start, the company disclaimer 
that also normally goes with an assignment is similarly important in most 
cases (see http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/assign.html). It also does, 
indeed, cause the code base to be better protected than if any chunks of 
it are actually in the public domain rather than under the eCos licence.

(And we do not want code submitted under the basis of the eCos licence 
rather than PD as it makes it impossible to adjust the licence in future 
without the consent of all copyright holders, e.g. for GPLv3.)

So what this means is that it is acceptable for Jani to follow this system 
*as a special case*. It will be more work for him however, as it will 
require a disclaimer for every change.

Jani will need to sign and submit a disclaimer similar to the FSF one. You 
can find an example at 
http://helios.dii.utk.edu/ftp/pub/xemacs/old-beta/FSF/disclaim.changes but 
the address at the bottom should be the Red Hat assignment address from 
the eCos web pages, not Richard Stallman.

However, I should re-emphasise that this is an exception. The maintainers
will not in general indulge this for the reasons above.

I would still ask for Jani to reconsider. Only one assignment is required 
for all eCos contributions including future ones (see the assignment 
form), whereas putting changes in the public domain will need to be done 
for each contribution.

Jifl
-- 
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


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