Re: Copyright assignment

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

I'm not even entirely convinced mere translations are even
copyrightable.  Am I mistaken?

If they are, and they're GPL licensed and Novell doesn't own the
copyright, Novell would not be able to distribute them as part of a non-
GPL product, whether they are linked, loaded, or finely minced and fried
in butter.  The key here is the redistribution -- Novell could for
example include a utility to allow users to download GPL-licensed
translation files separately from their distribution.

But regardless I think that everyone now mostly understands the
ramifications of copyright assignment the way Novell is doing it.
Further discussion I don't think will enlighten anyone further.  At this
point its up to the release team to make the final decision as to
whether to include Evolution, which I expect them to make in the
affirmative.

Members of the community will now understand what it means to contribute
to Evolution and to assign their copyright to Novell, and can make their
own informed decision as to whether they are comfortable in doing so.
Undoubtedly some who might otherwise have contributed to Evolution will
not as a result of the copyright assignment policy, and others will not
mind.  Either way, Evolution will continue to be an excellent piece of
Free-with-a-capital-f software.

As I believe the points relevant to this list have been made, please
continue the general discussion about copyright assignment on
foundation-list.

-Rob

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 12:07 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > 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" :)
> 
> Those are data files that are loaded at runtime, they are not linked
> with the application.  Am I wrong?
> 
> Miguel.
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>