Re: [gentoo-trustees] joint copyright agreement

[Grant Goodyear]

Daniel Ostrow wrote: [Mon Sep 19 2005, 01:00:29PM CDT]
> On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 12:44 -0500, Deedra Waters wrote:
> > I'd like to try and keep things moving on this issue. So far, I've only
> > seen swift, corey, and dostrow's comments on this. Any other feedback on
> > this would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to see this done with by the
> > end of this year, and i think it's taken long enough.  So, my question
> > is, should we go with this? If so, how do we pitch this to the devs?
> > Reguardless of what we decide on, we're going to get oposision to this.

Of course we will, but the best way to minimize that opposition is to
have the devs involved.  My personal feeling is that I'm not
particularly opposed to it, but I'm also not entirely convinced that
it's necessary.  I've yet to see anything that convinces me that Gentoo
needs something stronger than the model that the Linux kernel is using.
(Similarly, anybody know how the *BSDs handle copyright transfer, if at
all?)  I'm willing to be convinced, but I haven't been yet.  Perhaps
part of the problem is that I have a hard time coming up with evil
things that people could do that could cause serious harm to Gentoo
where copyrighted code is concerned.

In any event, my feeling is that the best solution for swaying devs is
to explain what the various options are, and why we feel that this one
is the best option, and then listen to comments.

> As far as I'm concerned opposition is 100% irrelevant. The job of the
> foundation is to protect the intellectual property of the Gentoo
> Project, the only way we can do this is to hold a copyright or joint
> royalty-free license on all pertinent works. We need to push this
> through ASAP. The text of the document addresses every concern except
> for the "I'm a minor and I can't sign it and my parents don't want to."
> concern.

Here I strongly disagree.  If this copyright agreement is so important,
then we should be able to convince our devs of that fact, instead of
trying to "push it through".

> For all those who don't want to sign something because they feel that it
> is against the spirit of free software they don;t understand what is
> actually at stake. We are becoming more popular by the day and
> eventually we may have to defend something that is rightfully ours. As
> it stands we are on VERY soft ground if it were to happen tomorrow.

If _what_ were to happen tomorrow?  Some at least semi-realistic
scenarios would be helpful here.

Also, is that sort of copyright agreement something that we can actually
enforce?  What keeps a dev from starting up a project on berlios, for
example, with a group of other people who may or may not be devs,
writing a replacement for portage or genkernel or such, and then because
it's a particularly well-written piece of software having it be the
default special-magic-widget in Gentoo?

I don't mean to sound negative.  I just assume that if I'm not yet
convinced entirely, then our devs might not be either.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
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