[Shotwell] contribution copyright

[Adam Dingle]

Xavi,

Yorba does not require copyright assignment.  Anyone who has made a non-trivial contribution to Yorba's programs retains the copyright to their work, so the copyright to Yorba's programs is held both by Yorba (for the bulk of the code) and by numerous other contributors.  This is a common (but certainly not the only) practice in the free software world.  I believe that most GNOME projects work the same way (see more at http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment).  As you know, the Free Software Foundation works differently and requires a license agreement from contributors.

Our coding conventions (http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/yorba/wiki/CodingConventions) include the text 

  Each source file originating at Yorba should begin with the following banner:
  /* Copyright 2012 Yorba Foundation... */

Note the words "originating at Yorba". Â Anyone external who sends us a new source file or makes a non-trivial contribution to an existing source file is welcome to put their name in a copyright header at the top.

adam

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Xavi Viader <xavierviader at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Camilo, 
thanks for your answer, I guess you are right, the copyright header would 
be an implicit a copyright assignment. 

I'm not in favour about giving rights or not, I'm just investigating how it 
works. It was a surprise, for me, to know how FSF manage copyright. 

Any yorba confirmation? 

Xavi 

2012/4/23 Camilo Polymeris 

> On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Xavi wrote: 
> > Hi Joe, 
> > it helps a bit but no clear yet... who owns, the copyright, of code I 
> gave? 
> > Yorba or even giving it it's going to mine? So yorba is made by several 
> > copyrights? 
> 
> Hello Xavier, 
> 
> first, I don't work for yorba and I am not a lawyer, so take this with 
> a grain of salt, but: the yorba coding guidelines[1] ask you to put a 
> file header declaring copyright to the yorba foundation in all source 
> files you submit, which, I guess could be understood as an implicit 
> copyright assignment. On the other hand, I have contributed a little 
> code and they haven't asked me to sign either a formal contributor 
> license agreement (CLA) or to explicitely assign copyright to Yorba, 
> like e.g. the FSF does. 
> Again, IANAL, but I understand that even if there was a CLA you'd 
> still remain the owner of the copyright, but would be agreeing to a 
> worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, etc... license to distribute 
> your code. 
> 
> Regards, 
> Camilo 
> 
> [1] http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/yorba/wiki/CodingConventions 
> 
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