Re: Copyright assignment

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 19:05 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 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?

The translation and documentation teams come to mind.  I really have no
idea how copyright works with respect to translations, but I do know
that major documentation contributors hold copyrights.  Is copyright
assignment required for documentation contributions as well?

--
Shaun