Kurt Lieber wrote:

>On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 08:26:30AM -0500 or thereabouts, Deedra Waters wrote:
>  
>
>>If the current form isn't enforceable, then having people sign it doesn't really do us much good
>>    
>>
>
>Regardless of whether or not it's enforceable, I think enough devs have
>expressed concern about the things it purports to enforce.  
>
>IMO, we should heed those concerns, stop requiring new devs to sign the doc
>and figure out a way to get a better doc in place.
>
>--kurt
>  
>
Ok, so I was just talking to dmwaters on irc and she mentioned this part 
that I may have missed, that efforts were going on to redraft a new 
contract. I'd like to take this chance to voice my concern about this 
and suggest that we forego a contract of this nature (if we can even do 
it legally wrt <18, other countries, etc, etc) and treat copyright 
assignment just like any other devrel issue. Basically I suggest just 
saying that some inclusive list of files such as ebuilds, init scripts, 
gentoo specific scripts in cvs, what-have-you and treat it like a devrel 
issue if that doesn't happen.

What I'm thinking is that we don't have a contract saying you won't do 
something malicious in an ebuild, and we don't need to. If something 
like that happened disciplinary action would be taken against the dev 
and I assume he/she would be dismissed. Why is the copyright assignment 
any different? If a developer doesn't assign the copyright we just say 
'hey, you can't do that, you can either change it or remove it and cease 
being a dev'

A contract is superfluous and chances are it's unenforcable anyway, no 
other (?) GPL projects do this do they? Do other community based distros?


Joshua Brindle

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