Re: PROPOSAL: Evolution for GNOME 2.8

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

The position stated in the policy draft is that it's a bad idea to
assign copyright to anyone but the FSF or GNOME Foundation, with FSF
preferred if you must.  One important advantage that copyright
assignment nullifies is the fact that no entity has the power to create
a non-free forked version, whereas in a copyright assignment situation,
depending in the agreement used for the assignment, the company can
indeed choose to do that.

While Ximian demonstrated repeatedly that it's a good corporate citizen
in the GNOME community, and Novell seems committed to maintaining that
relationship, I do not think that it is in the best interests of the
GNOME community to rely on the good graces of Novell not to adopt a
proprietary model with all or part of the Evolution code base.

Of course, it's not possible to revoke GPL once shipped, but it would be
possible to fork it and start shipping a combined work with the GPL code
but not license it under the GPL.

Basically the moral of the story is I'd like to see the agreement that
Novell uses for copyright assignment.  If the agreement is not
acceptable, I would support the inclusion of a "forked" community
evolution that does not require assignment of copyright to Novell.

-Rob

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 15:47 -0600, Elijah P Newren wrote:
> For what it's worth...
> 
> > <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> > > 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.
> 
> I agree it's not a big concern, but I'll have to disagree somewhat with
> you and Nat on copyright assignment.  I do think it's an issue, for the
> very reason Paolo raised (and the fact that it's
> yet-another-barrier-to-entry for prospective developers).  However, I
> don't think it's a very big issue and I do support Evolution becoming
> part of Gnome 2.8.
> 
> <quote who="Jeff Waugh">
> > > 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.
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Is that really a huge problem for the community in general, with Evolution?
> 
> Personally, I think it is an issue but I think it's a very minor one. 
> I'm all in favor of Evolution becoming part of Gnome 2.8.
> 
> 
> Elijah
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