Re: Issues cooperation

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-11-27 at 17:57, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 01:23:44PM -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> [...]
> >         * Accepting contributions:  This is copyright assignment
> >         papers.  We have been as guilty here as pretty much every other
> >         free software project.  However, work is underway within the
> >         GNOME Foundation to request copyright assignments from
> >         contributors to the core GNOME packages.
> 
> Every other time this has come up (e.g. in foundatin meeting minutes),
> it has been pitched as "the infrastructure is being set up to permit
> people to assign their copyrights to the GNOME foundation if they wish".
> This is quite different from requesting copyright assignments and
> claiming (as you do later in this mail) that having all the copyrights
> assigned to the GNOME foundation is necessarily better for everybody.

Oh, I did not mean for it to be understood that way :)

Copyright assignments will certainly be voluntary.  It would be stupid
to disregard code contributions just because someone wants to keep the
copyright on their code.

For one thing, it would be pretty difficult to find all the contributors
who already have code in the core libraries at this point.

I don't know if having copyrights assigned to the GNOME Foundation is
better for everybody or not, but having them may make things easier if
we ever have to deal with a license violation in a court of law.

I am not a lawyer, blah blah.

  Federico