Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Soliciting Feedback: Gentoo Copyright Assignments / Licensing

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 08:17:59PM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> For further messages in this thread, please keep:
> Reply-To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o, gentoo-nfp@l.g.o
>
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 08:08:45PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 02:32:25AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 01:16:25PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > > > On a personal note, if any copyright assignment was in place, I would
> > > > never have been able to become a Gentoo developer, and if it were to be
> > > > put into place, I do not think that I would be allowed to continue to be
> > > > one.  I'm sure lots of other current developers are in this same
> > > > situation, so please keep that in mind when reviewing this process.
> > > This is a question for gregkh primarily, but I would also like to extend
> > > it to all other Gentoo developers.
> > >
> > > 1. Are you party to any *copyright assignment* (eg FSF copyright assignment)?
> > You need to rephrase this to be (in order for it to make any sense):
> >   Are you party to any *copyright assignment* that is not part of your
> >   employment agreement?
> No, copyright assignments from your employment agreement are a valid
> answer to question #1.

In the US, almost _all_ employment agreements have such wording, so this
really isn't going to be able to tell you much.

> > > 2. Are you party to any *contributor license agreements* (eg FLA, Google CLA, ...)? [2]
> > > 3. Are you party to any other *license assertions* (eg DCO)? [3]
> > > 4. Are you party to or aware of any other copyright aggregation efforts? [4]
> > Note also, anyone who works for any company, might not be allowed to
> > answer some of these questions, and, might not want to (i.e. the
> > employer is requiring the person to do the work on a specific project,
> > despite the fact that the developer doesn't like the copyright
> > assignment rules for it.)
> I don't want the specifics, just a yes or no. A "I cannot answer this
> for contractual reasons" is a very useful red flag as well.

What if those contractual reasons don't even allow you to say that?
(seriously, I've seen contracts like that before, the startup world is
very wierd that way.)

> For yourself, I'm fairly certain you are party to DCO's per #3, because
> you send in work to the kernel with Signed-off-by lines. I don't know
> about your employment contracts, and I was hoping to get that piece of
> clarification.

The wording of most employment agreements (in the US it's not really a
contract at all, only in rare cases), do not allow them to be disclosed
to anyone outside of the company.  So this might not be something that
some people can talk about in public without getting into big trouble.

> > I think you want to rephrase this as asking what types of projects, from
> > a copyright assignment basis, do people contribute to, on their own
> > time.  But even then, you will run into problems with corporate
> > restrictions.
> >
> > Hm, this is a mess.  What are you trying to find out here?  What type of
> > projects to people work on based on the copyright assignment rules?  Or
> > something else?
> As one of the Foundation trustees, I wanted a rough survey of how
> copyright is handled in other employment and projects for a
> (self-selecting) sample of developers. I don't care what the work or
> projects are - just how it breaks down.
>
> ===
> $W devs are aware/party other copyright aggregation efforts.
> Number of developers already party to:
> copyright assignment - $X devs
> CLAs - $Y devs
> other license assertions - $Z devs
> ===
> (plus looking at useful overlaps).

I think you might be able to infer the answers to your questions if you
ask them in a totally different way.  For example, if you were to say:
  - Have you contributed to a project that requires the DCO?
  - Have you contributed to a project that requires the copyright to be
    assigned to the FSF?
and the like.  That information, being that that knowledge is usually
public, can almost always be answered safely, and gets around the
disclosure of company/employer contracts and agreements quite nicely, as
you really don't care about the information in those agreements, right?

Aren't contracts and legal agreements fun?  :)

thanks,

greg k-h