On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 13:13, Paolo Borelli wrote:
My primary concern with this is that some people (me included, but other
on irc agreed) which just want to submit a couple of patches to scratch
their itches, often cannot be bothered to do the required paperwork even
if they would have no problem with the copyright assignment itself.
I don't think this is a big concern; as Nat says copyright assignment is
a good idea.
What I'd worry about more is the asymmetric assignment situation for say
OO.org (and I think but I'm not sure for Evolution), where one company
has the exclusive right to create proprietary versions or link in
proprietary code. Basically we're talking about a GPL loophole.
Netscape had this loophole for Mozilla in the NPL, which gave them
special privileges to credit them for creating the codebase. See:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/NPL-1.1.html
However the NPL has a time limit; the Netscape special privileges ended
after 2 years.
Of course Qt, MySQL, etc. use this as a business model. Red Hat's Cygwin
does as well.
In practice I think this is a real problem for StarOffice/OO.org and
only a hypothetical problem for Evolution (now that Connector is open
source).