Re: Copyright assignment

[Christoffer Olsen <co deworks net>]

I would definately see the point of the Foundation governing the
copyrights for code in GNOME. The main point of this would be to
effectively defend the rights to copy in the event of misuse, infrigment
or lawsuits, but I can understand that contributors might be afraid of
proprietary use of code. For instance; code that is contributed to
Evolution is also yours to control, but it can also end up being used in
a proprietary environment, which might counter the original author's
wishes about having his code to be open and guaranteed to stay that way.

I would have no problems assigning copyright to the Foundation for my
GNOME work, but I'd like to see a clause in the assignment that tells me
that the Foundation must distribute this code under the terms of the GPL
(or the licence that applies to the module contributed to), and failure
to do so removes the Foundation's right to copy the code.

Now, the only problem is that copyright assignment creates a lot of
paperwork, but hopefully an assignment can be signed once, and stay
valid under the terms given.

This is a bit babblish, mostly because of a lack of knowledge on this
area, but I think you get my point.

Best wishes,
Christoffer

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 17:04 -0700, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Rob Adams">
> 
> > Note that this issue has previously (before the evolution proposal) been
> > discussed on foundation-list, in the context of putting together a
> > policy on copyright.  This is the part of the copyright policy draft
> > that was put together at the time but never officially "blessed"
> > relating to copyright assignment:
> > http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright/x68.html
> 
> I don't think it was blessed because of the following statement:
> 
>   "Of course, it is possible to assign your copyright to any other person or
>   organization. The GNOME Foundation does not recommend doing this, however,
>   since the future freedom of the software cannot necessarily be assured if
>   you, for example, assign your copyright to an organization not interested
>   in keeping the software Free."
> 
> 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.
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> [1] because the Foundation doesn't do it yet
>