Future code ownership

[Jonathan Larmour]

Gary Thomas wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 02:26, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> 
>>>6) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a US not-for-profit 
>>>organisation. <http://www.spi-inc.org/> Its goals are to advance open 
>>>source. They are well known already as the copyright holders of many well 
>>>known projects like Debian Linux, GNOME, LSB as well as owners of the Open 
>>>Source marque, and so on. They are trusted.  We have already taken the 
>>>step of asking them in principle if they could accept eCos as a project, 
>>>even with our funky licensing proposal outlined above. And as you can see 
>>>from 
>>><http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/resolution-2002-10-08.mgs> 
>>>this was accepted.
>>>
>>>Personally I favour this option. I think it is best for eCos as an Open 
>>>Source project, and I would like to hope even Red Hat would be able to 
>>>support it, as it would be in the long-term best interests of eCos. 
>>>Besides if the licensing proposal does pay off, they would profit!
>>
>>Has the opinion of RH been sought on this? 
>>
>>To me, this does seem like the best option.
> 
> Frankly, Red Hat's opinion should not matter.  They're the ones
> that caused all this ruckus in the first place.

Ostensibly true, although if they did have something to say on it, I would 
be interested. If they have constructive feedback, it's welcome. You never 
know, some accomodation could be reached. Haha :-).

> As for me, I think this is the best solution.  My main reason
> for putting my copyright in files I touch (which I believe matches 
> those who followed me) was to preclude Red Hat from simply taking
> work that I and others had done and selling it to the highest
> bidder.  [n.b. of course the can still try to do this, but I'm
> sure that some lawyer somewhere will stop them]

Only if you pay that lawyer yourself ;-). It's up to the copyright holders 
to enforce. Indeed that's one disadvantage of the "free for all, no 
assignments" approach, that it's more difficult to enforce legally.

> As Andrew has asked, how would we actually make such a change?
> We can't change Red Hat's copyright notices without their consent.

Indeed not.

> Or can we get away with just assigning any new work to the SPI?

Yes. It will have dual copyright, just like many files or dual copyright 
Red Hat and you, or Red Hat and Bart, etc.

Jifl
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