Re: Copyright assignment

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Hi Miguel,

On Monday at 20:09, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> One important question that needs to be answered here:  If Novell has no
>> interest in claiming proprietary interest in Evolution code, why do they
>> require copyright assignment?
>
> I can not speak for Evolution, but I can speak for Mono, another
> component that we own the copyright to.
>
> We want to keep the copyright for various reasons:
>
> 	* We can relicense the code to someone on proprietary terms.
>
> 	* We can defend effectively the copyright if it is miss-used.
>
> 	* It allows us to build proprietary features if we choose to.

Thanks, that pretty much clears it up.  I, for one, would never want
to assign copyright on anything I may (potentially) do on Mono or
Evolution code to Novell if this is the case: when I write something
as free software, I want it to *remain* free.  (Not to count the fact
that under Serbian copyright law [and I believe that's the case in EU
as well], I cannot assign "moral" rights to anyone but myself, and I
may revoke the assignment if I find my "work" misused.)

Perhaps not many contributors feel the same way, but I know at least
some do, and thus we lose some of the momentum free software
development model gives us.  My patches to Evolution have so far been
very small (not including translation, which is not so small, so I
think Novell would not be allowed to use Serbian translation in
proprietary product without consulting Serbian translators — correct
me if I'm wrong), so I am mostly talking "theory" :)

Cheers,
Danilo