Re: PROPOSAL: Evolution for GNOME 2.8

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 13:13, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> My primary concern with this is that some people (me included, but other
> on irc agreed) which just want to submit a couple of patches to scratch
> their itches, often cannot be bothered to do the required paperwork even
> if they would have no problem with the copyright assignment itself.

I don't think this is a big concern; as Nat says copyright assignment is
a good idea.

What I'd worry about more is the asymmetric assignment situation for say
OO.org (and I think but I'm not sure for Evolution), where one company
has the exclusive right to create proprietary versions or link in
proprietary code. Basically we're talking about a GPL loophole.

Netscape had this loophole for Mozilla in the NPL, which gave them
special privileges to credit them for creating the codebase. See:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/NPL-1.1.html

However the NPL has a time limit; the Netscape special privileges ended
after 2 years.

Of course Qt, MySQL, etc. use this as a business model. Red Hat's Cygwin
does as well.

In practice I think this is a real problem for StarOffice/OO.org and
only a hypothetical problem for Evolution (now that Connector is open
source).

I do support including Evolution in 2.8, however to the extent I'd worry
about copyright assignment this is the issue I would raise.

Havoc