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On Thursday 21 August 2003 18:56, Jon Portnoy wrote: |
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> On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 11:14:48AM +0100, Chris Bainbridge wrote: |
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> > On Thursday 21 August 2003 07:50, Jon Portnoy wrote: |
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> > > It's for our benefit. Otherwise, we're screwed. |
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> > > |
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> > > Frankly, sometimes we have to do things to protect ourselves, even if |
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> > > that means that when you contribute something to us, the contributed |
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> > > piece that becomes a part of Gentoo belongs in an intellectual property |
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> > > sense to Gentoo. You'll find the same situation if you want to |
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> > > contribute code to GNU projects: copyright must be assigned to the FSF |
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> > > so they can defend themselves. |
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> > |
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> > Just to chip in.. it seems a dangerous policy to advocate all of the |
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> > copyrights being held in one place. Even if you trust Gentoo Technologies |
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> > Inc. do you trust everyone else that has financial dealings with this |
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> > company? Do you trust that no one in the world will sue Gentoo Tech. |
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> > Inc., say for patent infringement, or maybe claim a contract dispute and |
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> > say that they own xxx lines of already contributed code? |
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> > |
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> > All it takes is for GTI to lose one court case and be bankrupted and it |
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> > will be obligated to sell its assets to pay court costs and fines. Now |
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> > any code where the copyright is solely held by GTI can have its license |
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> > changed to a closed, non-free one, and at that point a proprietory |
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> > non-free fork of Gentoo can be made. The GPL was explicitly designed to |
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> > prevent this but when copyright is assigned you must make clear in the |
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> > contract that the code can never be unGPLed. |
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> |
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> The GPL already states that. |
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That is incorrect. See for example the Sistina GFS fiasco. GFS was a GPL |
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product which had contributor copyrights assigned to Sistina. Then they |
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decided to go closed source, taking all the user contributions with them. |
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> > I am unclear how copyright assignment is being done at the moment? I have |
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> > never been asked to assign copyright for any contributed ebuilds, and I |
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> > have never signed a contract with GTI, as far as I am concerned I still |
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> > have copyright on those GPL ebuilds. |
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> |
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> Only if you changed the copyright header to mention your name rather |
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> than Gentoo Technologies. |
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Hmmm, I thought that copyright notice only applied to the header ;-) |
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-- |
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