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On 12/17/12 4:07 PM, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> Announcing once to -dev-announce due to the general importance of this |
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> topic to the community, but ALL replies should go to -nfp, or to |
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> trustees@ if you must, or to /dev/null if you shouldn't. |
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??? |
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> Before I start, yes, the trustees realize that there are legal issues |
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> around copyright assignment in general, and that various workaround |
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> exist and may or may not work, such as various contributor licensing |
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> agreements that are used by various organizations, especially in |
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> Europe. The purpose of this thread isn't really to debate this topic, |
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> as it might be moot in any case. |
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Agreed. |
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> The question we would like to get feedback from the Gentoo community |
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> on is this: is copyright assignment (or something like it) something |
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> Gentoo should even be pursuing, and if so, to what degree? Should we |
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> turn away contributions where assignments are not made? Should we aim |
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> for a voluntary but encouraged approach as used by KDE e.V.? Should |
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> we pursue this for some Gentoo projects but not others (such as for |
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> portage (the package manager), and perhaps eclass code, but not |
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> ebuilds)? |
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Keep the KDE e.V. practice. The idea behind our social contract is to |
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make sure to the best of our possibility that Gentoo (the distribution) |
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remains free software, anything beside that is just harming us in a way |
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or another alienating contributors. |
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> The main arguments for owning copyright of something would be: |
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> 1. Legal simplicity |
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Moot point once you go over the country border, for each country and |
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each border. |
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> 2. Ability to re-license (obviously in accordance with the social |
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> contract, and this could even be enforced with a model like the FSFe's |
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> FLA) |
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Debatable, cautious people prefer keeping thing as static as possible in |
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this regard. |
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> 3. Standing to pursue copyleft license violations |
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That can be achieved by other means, the easiest is to appoint a lawyer |
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for the group of people involved enumerating them all. |
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Having a collective procedure in which you have a single entity |
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representing all the stakeholder would grant the violator an outcome |
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different than paying damages and being unable to use such software, |
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such as negotiating a reinstatement of the license at the same time or |
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settle it out of court. |
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> Feedback from any member of the Gentoo community (loosely defined) is |
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> welcome. If anybody has STRONG feelings on this matter, please be |
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> sure to voice them either in public or in private, as I can't |
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> guarantee that there will be another opportunity to do so. |
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As I had stated before I feel that not forcing people to get into the |
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messy field of passing over the copyright would be the best outcome, yet |
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would be nice having proper tracking by technical means. And in this |
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case complete the git migration for the repositories of interest. |
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lu |
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