Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild info: author, maintainer and copyrights

[Kenneth Vestergaard Schmidt]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 10:44:23PM +0200, Vitaly Kushneriuk wrote:
> > > No, chouser was right.  I'm getting a bit worried by this trend of
> > > Junior Gentoo Linux developers "explaining" Gentoo Linux policy when
> > > they have no idea what said policy is.
>
> This was _not_ my attempt to explain Gentoo policy, but rather my
> personal opinion on the subject. I'd say exactly the same if I was not
> a part of the Gentoo team. This is just my view of the ways of
> open-source. Personaly I will _not_ contribute to a project that one day
> can go closed-source(or public domain, which is the same ;).
> And this is what distributed copyright prevents very good.
> And if you'll check headers of ebuilds that I made, you'll seee
> (c) vitaly@g.o ;)

What _real_ difference does it make? The only difference is that
Gentoo Technologies, Inc. can't relicense it and make a closed-source
version. However, if it was possible for them, and if they did, everybody
could just ignore them and continue working on the last version released
under the GPL.

> > > All ebuilds should be Copyrighted by Gentoo Technologies, Inc. or should
> > > generally not be put on Portage.
>
> It sounds, _at least_ suspicious.

If you don't trust Gentoo Technologies, Inc. which is (AFAIK) controlled by
Daniel Robbins, how can you contribute to this project? I mean, FSF requires
that you assign copyright to them if you want to contribute to their projects,
simply because of management-issues, and because it makes it easier for them
to help out in case of lawsuits and the likes.

> > > # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2 only
> you can change it right now in skel.ebuilds so that future contributions
> will have it _by_default_. Still if author wants to change it, he's in
> his right to do so.
> Again, check my ebuilds, you'll see GPL v2. No "or later". I just do not
> trust RMS. Why should I trust Gentoo?

Personally, I think that if you want to become an active contributor to a
project, you at least have to know what their mission is and what they stand
for. If you don't trust Gentoo enough to assign copyright to them, I don't
think you've understood their mission well enough. I am not claiming to know
it myself, I just think that active contribution should mean at least a
basic knowledge of the overall goal.

As a side-remark, this is one of the requirements of the Debian New Maintainer
process. You have to demonstrate adequate abilities to be an asset, but also
demonstrate that you know the difference between 'free' software and 'libre'
software, and that you are aware of their overall goals and purpose. Since
I am not (yet ;-)) an active contributor to Gentoo, I am not aware of the
process for becoming an official developer, but I can heartily recommend a
process akin to this. One of our latest additions is that in order to become
a Debian Developer you need to get a package "sponsored", meaning that you
make a package suitable for inclusion in the main Debian archive, and the
sponsor checks the package for errors, and then uploads it into the archive.
If the package is good, this demonstrates adequate skills.

Enough rambling from me. A last comment: what's be big fuss about. Aren't we
primarily talking about .ebuilds? I fail to see the great use for retaining
the copyright. I mean, it's not like /my/ next job depends on me having to
use proprietary ebuilds ;-)

--
Kenneth Vestergaard Schmidt
kvs@×××××××××××××××.dk			charon@××××××.org