Re: Copyright assignment

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> In general, having say sign five legal letters to be able to hack on all parts of
> desktop would be rather limiting. So really, it would be nice if the general policy
> was that such assignment requirements are and contiunue to be very much
> unacceptable. Foundation getting its act together and offering a way to assign
> copyrights to itself would also help to remove problems with the single assignment
> related concern GNOME should be concewrned about, that is licencing integrity. 
> 
> Having a futuire written policy of "there is no copyright assignment needed or such
> will be assigned to the foundation" would be good.

Various companies that fund work might have different reasons to keep
copyright ownership over their code.  OpenOffice will likely continue
to require copyright assignment, so will Evolution, so will Real and as
a strategy to get folks to open source their technologies, I will
personally continue to encourage companies to open source software and
ask for copyright assignment as a way of keeping a bit of a leverage.

Not the ideal situation, but in the past it has opened the doors for
more free software to be available.

Is it a problem to sign five pieces of paper to get your code
contributed?  Very likely, but how many people are practically involved
in all of these projects in a day-to-day basis?

I do not believe it is as problematic as people are making it to be.

Miguel.