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

[Alec Warner]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> wrote:
> On 12/17/12 4:07 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> Announcing once to -dev-announce due to the general importance of this
>> topic to the community, but ALL replies should go to -nfp, or to
>> trustees@ if you must, or to /dev/null if you shouldn't.
>
>
> ???
>
>
>> Before I start, yes, the trustees realize that there are legal issues
>> around copyright assignment in general, and that various workaround
>> exist and may or may not work, such as various contributor licensing
>> agreements that are used by various organizations, especially in
>> Europe.  The purpose of this thread isn't really to debate this topic,
>> as it might be moot in any case.
>
>
> Agreed.
>
>
>> The question we would like to get feedback from the Gentoo community
>> on is this: is copyright assignment (or something like it) something
>> Gentoo should even be pursuing, and if so, to what degree?  Should we
>> turn away contributions where assignments are not made?  Should we aim
>> for a voluntary but encouraged approach as used by KDE e.V.?  Should
>> we pursue this for some Gentoo projects but not others (such as for
>> portage (the package manager), and perhaps eclass code, but not
>> ebuilds)?
>
>
> Keep the KDE e.V. practice. The idea behind our social contract is to make
> sure to the best of our possibility that Gentoo (the distribution) remains
> free software, anything beside that is just harming us in a way or another
> alienating contributors.
>
>
>> The main arguments for owning copyright of something would be:
>> 1.  Legal simplicity
>
>
> Moot point once you go over the country border, for each country and each
> border.

I believe Rich means legal simplicity from the Foundation's point of
view. If the Foundation were to re-license, we would have to contact
all contributors. That is complex and a lot of work, so that avenue is
basically never available. Plus we have to do it every time we take a
similar action. If we had some sort of agreement, that would be a
one-time deal per contributor, and it would make it 'legally simpler'
for the Foundation to do these things.

>
>
>> 2.  Ability to re-license (obviously in accordance with the social
>> contract, and this could even be enforced with a model like the FSFe's
>> FLA)
>
>
> Debatable, cautious people prefer keeping thing as static as possible in
> this regard.
>
>
>> 3.  Standing to pursue copyleft license violations
>
>
> That can be achieved by other means, the easiest is to appoint a lawyer for
> the group of people involved enumerating them all.
>
> Having a collective procedure in which you have a single entity representing
> all the stakeholder would grant the violator an outcome different than
> paying damages and being unable to use such software, such as negotiating a
> reinstatement of the license at the same time or settle it out of court.
>
>
>> Feedback from any member of the Gentoo community (loosely defined) is
>> welcome.  If anybody has STRONG feelings on this matter, please be
>> sure to voice them either in public or in private, as I can't
>> guarantee that there will be another opportunity to do so.
>
>
> As I had stated before I feel that not forcing people to get into the messy
> field of passing over the copyright would be the best outcome, yet
> would be nice having proper tracking by technical means. And in this case
> complete the git migration for the repositories of interest.

I actually think copyright *assignment* is the wrong term to use. In
general I like what Google does for their open source work. You keep
your copyright on your work, but grant the entity (Google in this
case) a worldwide license to do whatever they want (or in the
Foundations case, a license to do some limited things that the
Foundation wants to make their lives easier.) I'm not saying that is
what the Foundation is planning; but at least it is the most appealing
to me.

>
> lu
>
>