Re: Another job for the Gnome Foundation ?

[Brian Behlendorf <brian collab net>]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Russell Steinthal wrote:
> Since I think that developers should be able to control the future
> uses of their code, I would oppose a mandatory assignment regime.

Totally reasonable.  But does the Gnome Foundation exist to protect
individual developers, or the foundation as a whole?  If part of the point
of the Foundation is to shield developers from legal liability associated
with the code, it can't do that on code it doesn't have the copyright on,
and having third-party code on the site becomes both a liability for the
project and additional complexity.

Why complexity?  If code is stored in the Gnome CVS tree and says
"Copyright Russell Steinthal", if Miguel goes in and modifies the code,
does it become "Copyright Russell Steinthal, Miguel de Icaza"?  Add in
fifty more changes by different developers, does it become fifty specific
names?  At a certain point, was it fifty individuals who wrote the code,
or collectively the Gnome foundation?  If that's where it ends up, why not
start there?

Additionally, having the ability to modify the license when the need
arrives helps make very thorny legal situations much easier to handle in
the long run.  The GPL has not yet been tested in court, and it could be
that there's something broken in it.  The GPL has a forwards-competibility
clause, sure, but then only Stallman (or anyone else who can
authoritatively claim to be publishing a "future version of the GPL") can
change it.  

> There's nothing wrong with the GNOME Foundation being able to accept
> assignments from willing authors, however, and a module maintainer
> should still be able to require patches to conform to a particular
> assignment regime before they are integrated.

I'm in agreement there, but I'd also say there shouldn't be an obligation
for the Gnome foundation to provide code hosting/development/management
etc for non-Gnome-assigned code.

	Brian