| 1 |
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:07:59AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: |
| 2 |
> Announcing once to -dev-announce due to the general importance of this |
| 3 |
> topic to the community, but ALL replies should go to -nfp, or to |
| 4 |
> trustees@ if you must, or to /dev/null if you shouldn't. |
| 5 |
> |
| 6 |
> Before I start, yes, the trustees realize that there are legal issues |
| 7 |
> around copyright assignment in general, and that various workaround |
| 8 |
> exist and may or may not work, such as various contributor licensing |
| 9 |
> agreements that are used by various organizations, especially in |
| 10 |
> Europe. The purpose of this thread isn't really to debate this topic, |
| 11 |
> as it might be moot in any case. |
| 12 |
|
| 13 |
I understand your wish to somehow think that the legal issues involved |
| 14 |
have no pertinence to this discussion, but that just isn't the case. In |
| 15 |
fact, they will be one of the major factors that control any decision |
| 16 |
that is picked, so you can't just ignore them, sorry. |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
> The question we would like to get feedback from the Gentoo community |
| 19 |
> on is this: is copyright assignment (or something like it) something |
| 20 |
> Gentoo should even be pursuing, and if so, to what degree? |
| 21 |
|
| 22 |
My personal opinion is, "No, the Gentoo Foundation should not be |
| 23 |
pursuing any copyright assignment for any code that it creates or |
| 24 |
manages." And my main justification for this goes to the above point, |
| 25 |
to do anything other than this is almost a legal impossibility for a |
| 26 |
project like Gentoo (i.e. one that spans the world and accepts |
| 27 |
contributions from people working for a wide range of companies) that |
| 28 |
wishes to continue to accept contributions from as many people as |
| 29 |
possible. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
This was the main reason that Gentoo gave up on the copyright assignment |
| 32 |
clause in the developer agreement all those years ago. |
| 33 |
|
| 34 |
Those who forget history, are doomed to repeat it, let's not go through |
| 35 |
all of this again, please. |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
On a personal note, if any copyright assignment was in place, I would |
| 38 |
never have been able to become a Gentoo developer, and if it were to be |
| 39 |
put into place, I do not think that I would be allowed to continue to be |
| 40 |
one. I'm sure lots of other current developers are in this same |
| 41 |
situation, so please keep that in mind when reviewing this process. |
| 42 |
|
| 43 |
thanks, |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
greg k-h |
Archives