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

[Robin H. Johnson]

For further messages in this thread, please keep:
Reply-To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o, gentoo-nfp@l.g.o 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 08:08:45PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> 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?
No, copyright assignments from your employment agreement are a valid
answer to question #1.

If I wanted to improve the wording (I was trying to keep the list of
questions as short as possible), I could have broken it down into:
1.1. Are you party to any explicit *copyright assignment* in your
     employment agreement?
1.2. Are you party to any other *copyright assignment*?

But I don't need that level of detail, I just wanted to know a simple
YES/NO, if they were party to any copyright assignment.

> 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.)
I'm not party to any of them - none of my employment contracts in the
past decade have included them. Several have actually had explicit
claims to say that my employer or company I'm doing consulting for does
explicitly does NOT obtain the copyright of anything I work on - I've
open-sourced practically all of my work in this time.
http://git.isohunt.com/gitweb/
http://git.sitka.bclibraries.ca/gitweb/
(not a complete list, because it doesn't include patches I've sent off
to other projects)

There is more work with open-source licenses, not yet released, but I
hope to get to those in future.

> 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.)
That's why the question was very general.

> > 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 don't want the specifics, just a yes or no. A "I cannot answer this
for contractual reasons" is a very useful red flag as well.

For yourself, I'm fairly certain you are party to DCO's per #3, because
you send in work to the kernel with Signed-off-by lines. I don't know
about your employment contracts, and I was hoping to get that piece of
clarification.

> 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?
As one of the Foundation trustees, I wanted a rough survey of how
copyright is handled in other employment and projects for a
(self-selecting) sample of developers. I don't care what the work or
projects are - just how it breaks down.

===
$W devs are aware/party other copyright aggregation efforts.
Number of developers already party to:
copyright assignment - $X devs
CLAs - $Y devs
other license assertions - $Z devs
===
(plus looking at useful overlaps).

Project Harmony was a very interesting effort, and relevant to our
efforts at examining copyright handling in Gentoo, but not without
many problems. Bradley M. Kuhn expounded on it best
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
See also teh GNOME Copyright Assignment Guidelines:
https://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment/Guidelines1G

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85