Re: [gentoo-nfp] joining the Software Freedom Conservancy (was: Nominations open for the 2007/08 Trustees)

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 19:38 +0200, Marius Mauch wrote:
> 1) just to be sure, did someone check the transfer agreement between the
> Foundation and the old Gentoo, Inc for potential problems?

We have not done this yet and actually didn't even think about it, so
thanks for bringing it up.

> 2) what would this mean for our copyright situation? In detail:
> a) who would (legally) own the copyright?

SFC

> b) what would (in theory) be involved if we'd want to enforce/change
> the license?

So long as we fall within the SFC guidelines, we could change the
license(s) under which we deliver our software at any time.  In other
words, a change from GPL-2 to GPL-3 would be possible, but a change from
GPL-2 to, say, some proprietary license, would not.

> c) if the copyright were owned by the Conservancy, would we have to
> change our copyright headers (in existing and/or new files)?

Yes

> 3) the time it takes to process a funding request worries me a little
> bit as well, but then I've never had to deal with that so I'll trust
> people who have more experience with that.

It takes us damn near forever as it is now.  I'm not sure we'd be making
the problem worse, and likely would be improving the situation.

> 2c) is the thing that concernes me the most, changing all of our
> copyright notices would be a huge pain.

Actually, it isn't that much of a pain to do in the tree.  Where it
would be a pain is all the other little spots we have copyright notices
that we don't think about that would need to be changed.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation