Re: [gentoo-dev] Some council topics for March meeting

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 01:26:07 -0700 "Daniel Robbins"
<drobbins.daniel@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 3/3/07, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@×××××××.org> wrote:
> > > But you appear to act as the project lead for PMS.
> >
> > No, I'm just the one who isn't yet sufficiently jaded by the whole
> > "people who don't know what PMS is jumping in and trying to derail
> > it" thing to have given up discussing it in public yet.
>
> Who is the project lead then?

spb.

> Also, you are at least a developer of PMS, if not the lead. If PMS is
> an official Gentoo project, then since when can official Gentoo
> projects have "non-dev" devs?

How many non-developers contribute to the tree? How many non-developers
have submitted patches for Portage or eselect?

> > I'd be interested to see where this policy is documented. The
> > licence requirements are in the social contract; what about
> > copyright? As far as I'm aware, copyright requirements are only
> > imposed upon the tree...
>
> The Foundation was created to hold the copyrights for all Gentoo
> source code and documentation, logos, etc. I assigned the copyright of
> all Gentoo source code and documentation to the Gentoo Foundation for
> this purpose. This purpose (among others) is documented at
> http://foundation.gentoo.org.

But there's no requirement that copyright be assigned to the
Foundation, as far as I can see... At least, not for people who didn't
sign the draconian agreement that also meant that they had to hand over
all their hardware to the Foundation upon request...

> In the event of a copyright violation, the Foundation is able to hire
> a lawyer and act on behalf of all the copyright assignors. Without the
> assignment this is very difficult to do. If you would like to be able
> to have Gentoo enforce the terms of its licenses, then this is
> important. The FSF does the same thing. You know all this already. If
> you disagree with this approach, I certainly understand.

This is a myth perpetuated by the FSF for political reasons. There have
been plenty of successful defences (usually out of court) of projects
with huge numbers of copyright holders -- consider Linux, for example.

> > I'm also curious as to why people should be expected to assign
> > copyright to a group that is known for licence violations and
> > removing attribution from documents. How does this protect anything?
>
> Copyright assignment (first to Gentoo Technologies, Inc., then to
> Gentoo Foundation, Inc.) has *ALWAYS* been Gentoo policy.

Where is this documented? As far as I'm aware, there are two copyright
requirements:

* The "ebuilds in the tree" requirement, which is documented in various
places

* The "all developers must sign a legal assignment form" requirement,
which was scrapped long ago.

> 1) Any material created by Gentoo developers, as part of an official
> Gentoo Project, needs to have copyright assigned to the Gentoo
> Foundation, whether or not it is currently included in the Portage
> tree. This protects all of our collective contributions against
> misuse, which is why it is policy.

Where is this requirement documented?

> 2) Any material not assigned to the Gentoo Foundation cannot be
> considered an official Gentoo Project. It would not fall under the
> umbrella/scope of the development project that is Gentoo, which is in
> part a legal structure to protect our collective work, (code, logos,
> etc.) and would be considered a third-party project.

Where is this requirement documented? How do you account for the
official Gentoo projects that do not follow this requirement?

> I'd be really surprised - flabbergasted, really - if this has changed.
> But at this point I almost wouldn't be surprised. :)

Again, so far as I'm aware, the only non-tree copyright assignment that
was a requirement was for developers who signed the long-abolished
hideous legal document. If there are requirements to the contrary that
I've missed then I'd like to see them -- as the main copyright holder
for at least one official Gentoo project, this is something that is
extremely relevant to me.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh
Mail                                : ciaranm at ciaranm.org
Web                                 : http://ciaranm.org/
Paludis, the secure package manager : http://paludis.pioto.org/