Re: Evolution copyright assignment: Storm in a teacup

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

On l�2004-08-07 at 12:44 +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 13:28 +0200, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> > On l�2004-08-07 at 12:17 +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:

> It would make me calm down if people started reading instead of lying
> about me!

And if you calmed down you might actually start reading what people write to you ;)

> If I wanted that why would I choose the GPL?

You didn't choose GPL, Ximian did, and you should be darn happy they
did.

> > Are you just afraid that they are going to stop give you your favorite
> > email client for free? I think your position is more immoral than
> > theirs, you just want to have have have without giving anything (pretty
> > egoistic if you ask me)...
> 
> No. I've never said that. I'm not complaining about the possibility to
> make it non-gratis.
> 
> What I'm complaining about is about including a gnome module that
> developers who want to contribute must give away from the community
> their code without anything in return.

"without anything in return"? How about the best email client on the
planet for free? It's people like you that make companies afraid of open
sourcing their products. Nothing is _EVER_ enough...

> They're trying to make code one writes in the spirit of the GPL being
> turned proprietary.

People work on various projects for lots of different reasons. Far from
everyone does it "in the spirit of GPL". You are free to contribute your
code or not, if you do it "in the spirit of GPL" you just don't
contribute your code to Evolution. Easy enough...

> > I do however see one drawback of copyright assignment and that is that
> > some people can't work on those project due to contracts with their
> > employeer stating that the employeer should have all copyright. This is
> > however exactly the same as working on an FSF project.
> 
> Yes to the first phrease, No to the second: the FSF promises to keep all
> assigned contributions Free Software.

Perhaps you should start live as you preach. I said that _if_ a
developer has a contract with his employer that states that everything
he writes will be copyrighted to that company it's the _exact_ same
problem with working on an FSF project. He can't assign the copyright to
_anyone_ but his employer.

Anyway, back to hacking.

-- 
Imendio HB, http://www.imendio.com/