Re: Copyright assignment

[Elijah P Newren <newren math utah edu>]

Hi,

<For those sick of the thread: Nothing insightful here; I'm just
requesting that the previous poster do something more than make
assertions--feel free to delete now>

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 20:53 +0100, Sander Vesik wrote:

> > I disagree entirely.  If you argue that we can't allow this, then you're
> > also arguing that we can't allow a project that is under the BSD license
> > (or MIT/X or similar) to be included in the Gnome D&DP--because such a
> > project could also be made proprietary.  I totally disagree with that
> > stance.  If you don't want to contribute to such a project, that's your
> > choice, but I think it's totally unreasonable that BSD and MIT licensed
> > projects should not be considered for inclusion in the Gnome desktop and
> > platform.  Besides, as Fernando pointed out, we do have a precedent for
> > required copyright assignment (libart_lgpl).
> 
> With all due respect - but this is UTTER TOTAL CRACK. The situation between 
> a project that is based on BSD / MIT licence (like say libxml unless i'm
> misremembering what Daniel did with the licencing situation) and a copyright
> assignment giving a way for proprietary versions of code are entirely different.

Entirely different?  No, it isn't.  I admit that there is one difference
(anyone can make the BSD code proprietary, whereas only one entity can
make the code proprietary with copyright assignment).  However there is
a strong similarity--which I dutifully pointed out as my reason for
comparison in my argument--in that both codebases can be made
proprietary.  Now, perhaps you think that's not strong enough of a
similarity to justify the comparison as I used it in my argument, but if
so you should state why; merely asserting that they're entirely
different does not help.  Also, see below for the reason for my post.

> Even more, wirth BSd licenced vs copyright assignment you get different "types"
> od commercial spin-offs.

Can you explain what you mean by "types"?  It's hard to discuss
otherwise.  There's not many definitions of "types" that I can think of
right now for which this would appear to be true, so I seem to be
thinking something different than what you are.

>  There are many good and valid arguments both for against
> allowing and disallowing copyright assigmnet but THIS is not one of them

Perhaps if you could explain how copyright assignment and code licensed
under the BSD liecense are different then we could discuss this further,
but I don't see how just making assertions is helping.  In my email, I
was responding to a previous email which basically stated that the
entire problem with copyright assignment was that contributions could be
made proprietary.  I was pointing out that the same could be said for
BSD code, so they either needed to verify that they also believed BSD
code was problematic (which I disagree with) or else find a better
argument.

>  (besides
> being wrong). 

This is totally vague.  Are you merely repeating previous assertions
here?  What exactly are you stating is wrong?


Elijah