Re: Copyright assignment

[Elijah P Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 17:04 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> I don't think it's in the Foundation's best interests to *not* recommend
> assignment, but clearly we need to figure out the right thing to do in the
> general case with regards to non-Foundation [1] copyright assignments.

Is there any problem with just stating that it's the maintainer's
decision for each module?  Basically, there's two issues causing the
commotion: (1) requiring copyright assignment means that the code could
be released under a proprietary license, (2) requiring copyright
assignment means that you lose potential contributors who don't like
paperwork.  As far as item (1) goes, using it to disallow modules that
require copyright assignment is the same as trying to disallow code
under the BSD license in the D&DP.  As far as item (2) goes, it's
similar to coding style or design choices--those who don't like the
maintainer's choices won't contribute, but that's something you have to
live with.

So, personally, I don't see any reason to not allow maintainers to
require copyright assignment for their modules.  I don't want all
modules in Gnome to start requiring copyright assignment, because I'm
one of those people who don't like paperwork.  But a maintainer's-choice
policy sounds just fine to me.

It would be nice though if the Gnome Foundation could accept copyright
assignments to reduce the paperwork in the case that many maintainers do
want to have some kind of copyright assignment in place.

Thoughts?  Comments?


Just my $0.02,
Elijah