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

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 02:32:25AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 01:16:25PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> > On a personal note, if any copyright assignment was in place, I would
> > never have been able to become a Gentoo developer, and if it were to be
> > put into place, I do not think that I would be allowed to continue to be
> > one.  I'm sure lots of other current developers are in this same
> > situation, so please keep that in mind when reviewing this process.
> This is a question for gregkh primarily, but I would also like to extend
> it to all other Gentoo developers.
>
> 1. Are you party to any *copyright assignment* (eg FSF copyright assignment)?

You need to rephrase this to be (in order for it to make any sense):
  Are you party to any *copyright assignment* that is not part of your
  employment agreement?

Otherwise, everyone in the US, and most other countries, would almost
always have to just say "yes" to this, as their employer owns the
copyright for their work no matter what it is done on (open source or
not.)

Remember, in the US, individuals who actually own the copyright on the
work they do is quite rare once they get out of college, and even then,
while in college, the school does have the right to assert copyright
ownership of the work, depending on what it was done on/for (who
provided the equipment, tasks, etc.)

> 2. Are you party to any *contributor license agreements* (eg FLA, Google CLA, ...)? [2]
> 3. Are you party to any other *license assertions* (eg DCO)? [3]
> 4. Are you party to or aware of any other copyright aggregation efforts? [4]

Note also, anyone who works for any company, might not be allowed to
answer some of these questions, and, might not want to (i.e. the
employer is requiring the person to do the work on a specific project,
despite the fact that the developer doesn't like the copyright
assignment rules for it.)

I think you want to rephrase this as asking what types of projects, from
a copyright assignment basis, do people contribute to, on their own
time.  But even then, you will run into problems with corporate
restrictions.

Hm, this is a mess.  What are you trying to find out here?  What type of
projects to people work on based on the copyright assignment rules?  Or
something else?

thanks,

greg k-h