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

[Vitaly Kushneriuk]

> But all of a sudden I have to trust you? You won't trust Gentoo, why should
> anybody want to trust eachother then? If people keep the copyright to them-
> selves, it would mean that small pieces of Gentoo could fall into proprie-
> tary status.
No. The whole point is that once no one is holding _all_ the copyrights
you don't have to worry. You don't have to trust me. 
If I want I _can_ use the code _I_ wrote in propriatry product. 
I can't do this to something _you_ wrote. And no matter what I do with
_my_ code that was released, you can still use it too, just you are
bound  by GPL to what you can do with it. So even if _all_ the 
copyrights  were in one hands, no one can take the project from the
public. 
It _is_ possible is this case to make some propriatry
version of it tho.

For example, noone is holding a copyrights for the _whole_ Linux kernel.
There's no copyright requirenments in sending a patch to it. 
The fact that Linux is GPL, ensures that all exhancements and bugfixes
are GPL too. IF for example, a company writes driver for Linux, they
still can release _their_ Windows driver that shares some of the code
with the Linux version with a different license. As long as the Linux
version is GPL-ed I don't care. It's _their_ work.

And it's not that I do not trust Daniel. The point is that I don't 
like to be _required_ to. The whole open-source community does not have
a single copyright holder. _Some_ of the code is (c) FSF. But GNU
contributors adviced do to that coz FSF has an ability to better
represent it in court etc. But there's much more code that is
copyrighted _mostly_ to the original author. Most of the software
that you'r using on you Linux system has as you call it "propriatry
status". You don't care much about it don't you?
Again, if he(the author)
accepted patches to his code, he does not hold copyrights to the patches
So if he wants to make the code propriatry he'll have to rewrite all
that was contributed, without "deriving" from the contributed code.
That's something that is doable , but for a project that has a lot of
contributors, it's very hard, or even impossible to do. 
But I'm ok with it if he does, after all that's his programm in the
first place, and I didn't pay him to do it for me.
In such case, I will be able to continue to develop the project myself,
it's GPL. 
 
	/Vitaly.