copyrights assignments

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

We talked about this briefly at the last steering committee meeting and I
think there was consensus, but I can't remember what the consensus was.  Did
we want to encourage people to assign copyrights to the FSF, or to the Gnome
Foundation, or do we not presently have an opinion on this issue?

Brian mentioned that, as corporations adopt Gnome, there'll be greater
concern about liability issues (patent and copyright infringement) and this
becomes a more important issue.  The Apache Software Foundation was created
largely to encourage Apache developers to assign copyrights to the
Foundation.  I believe that the OpenOffice Foundation requires copyright
assignments to that foundation (but they need that for their dual-licensing
I believe).

I don't think we necessarily need to resolve or even address that issue now.

Bart

Martin Baulig wrote:

> Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:
>
> > It is very likely that there are other duties which are appropriate and
> > necessary for the foundation to undertake; if so, they should be
> > mentioned explicitly, to avoid confusion later.
>
> I'd like to add something like the following:
>
> Copyrights
> ----------
>
> As official part of the GNU project we encourage people to assign all
> their copyrights to the FSF. However, if some party feels uncomfortable
> with this, copyrights can also be assigned to "the GNOME Project".
> In this case, the foundation will legally hold the copyright on behalf
> of the project.
>
> [Reword this paragraph in a way that it states that we neither "force"
>  nor push people to assign their copyrights to the FSF/GF. It should
>  only apply if people basically are willing to assign the copyright to
>  the FSF but feel uncomfortable with this for some reason.]
>
> Owner of "legal entities" such as domain names, copyrights etc.
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The foundation may hold legal entities such as domain names, trade marks,
> copyrights etc. on behalf of the GNOME project.
>
> [or something like this]
>
> --
> Martin Baulig
> martin@gnome.org (private)
> baulig@suse.de (work)