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On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 13:10 +0200, Petteri Räty wrote: |
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> I have a mostly user written ebuild in which he has put his copyright to |
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> the header instead of the standard one so repoman is not happy about it. |
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> What is the model we should follow these days? Since developers haven't |
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> been doing copyright assignment for a while there's so much of the tree |
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> that isn't actually under Gentoo Foundation copyright as far as I |
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> understand it so should we just allow adding individual developers to |
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> the headers along the Foundation? I will be adding a question about this |
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> to the quizzes when we get some decision done so that new developers get |
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> educated on this (probably also need to have this documented somewhere |
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> on your web pages). |
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|
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> This topic came up years ago. End solution was that ebuilds that go into |
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> the tree need to be assigned to the foundation. Reason for this is that |
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> if we ever have to go to court to protect any IP the author wont have to |
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> go to the courts with us to co-defend that IP. |
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|
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As the user concerned, I understand the logic of assigning copyright |
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(note that's copyright, not IP...). |
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Both the FSF and Sun have assignments for the GNU Classpath and |
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OpenJDK projects respectively, which I've already signed to. |
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|
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What strikes me as strange in the Gentoo case is that both the FSF and |
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Sun cases involve a formal signed contract, which also |
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provides a grantback of rights or dual assignment to the original |
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copyright holder. You can see the Sun terms in the SCA here: |
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http://sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf |
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Gentoo however seem to want me to just hand over copyright by simply |
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changing a file header. This strikes me as both wrong |
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and even perhaps legally insecure (IANAL). |
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|
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I'd be more than happy to have the ebuild included with my existing |
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copyright, and I don't see how that is any more defensible |
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than a Gentoo Foundation copyright which is not founded on a proper |
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assignment of rights. |
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-- |
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Andrew :-) |
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|
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Free Java Software Engineer |
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Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com) |
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|
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Support Free Java! |
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Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK |
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http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath |
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http://openjdk.java.net |
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|
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PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net) |
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Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA 7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8 |
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