Eric Kow writes: > For the GPL, we also are keep track of some folks' preferences for > license changes from the time I tried to make some progress on the > OpenSSL exception.
This is a good idea. > > 2. All contributors who wish to maintain copyright must insert a > > copyright notice in their own name, with the date each > > contribution was first published (eg, submitted to the > > mailing list or pushed to the main repo). > > Is there a sensible way to deal with files that have no copyright > assignment? "Assignment" is a legal term meaning "transfer of copyright". I assume you're referring to the "copyright notice" here. > Can we just leave them alone? Yes. Berne Convention says that copyright is automatic, and all major countries are party to that convention. A lack of notice is not harmful to the copyright holder's interests. The reason for the notice nowadays is for the convenience of those who want to obtain the copyright or a license for the code in that file. So if you are thinking of trying to get assignments for the code or something like that, this will be a pain in the neck if you try to do it all at once. > Or can we retroactively insert a copyright header for all major > authors listed in darcs changes? http://bugs.darcs.net/issue331 Probably it should be possible to write a script to list each author with files they have touched and when. If you're not going to break it down by file, then it's probably not worth doing. (IMO IANAL.) > > > # Copyright (C) 2010 The Darcs Team > Ian has pointed out that we could perhaps use the SFC as that > entity (I should check with them) > > # Copyright (C) 2010 Software Freedom Conservancy You actually need assignments of copyright to the SFC for this. A copyright notice is a statement of ownership. > I'm guessing this sort of thing could also be useful if we were to > start thinking about copyright transfer. Yes. N.B. If you're going to assemble all the copyrights in a holding entity such as "The Darcs Team, Inc" or the SFC, you should get advice about copyright registration in the U.S. AFAIK, without registration in the U.S. you cannot seek "statutory damages", and it would be really difficult to prove actual damages. I don't think you can recover legal fees without a contract that specifies that, so "statutory damages" is an important club to hold over an adversary who is inclined to get you to back down because you can't afford to go to court. However, I don't think you can practically register copyright of "community-owned" software, so this is only an option if you're going to bundle up all the Darcs copyrights in one owner. > I think the only reason I introduced this was uncertainty about > what to do when there is no copyright declaration (be the test case > public domain or not). There is no uncertainty. In the absence of any declaration at all, there is a default: All Rights Reserved. This would be the case for a patch submitted to the mailing list for discussion but not for application. Eg, Jason Dagit's recent patch might be an example if he left the license implicit. What he explicitly said IIRC is "I'm sending this because people want to try it." I think that's sufficient evidence that anybody who uses it personally is safe. But if you redistribute a Darcs with Jason's patch applied, he could sue you and he'd probably win, because those rights are reserved == not explicitly granted to us. (Not that he would, of course, I'm just using this as an example of how an American court would likely interpret such a case.) It is common practice in open source communities that the committers have a small set of customary licenses (eg, GPLv2+ for the main code and MIT for the tests in the case of Darcs), and community submissions are understood to use those licenses. As usual, the cautious advice is "get it in writing", but on the basis of this custom you could argue that submitting to the mailing list is an implicit acceptance of the practice. Although the court would probably sustain a complaint from a contributor, they'd just ask you to take out the code since you ha good reason to believe you had a license. > PS: and along the way, I notice Karl Fogel recommends getting > people to sign a contributor license agreement > <http://producingoss.com/en/copyright-assignment.html>, This is precisely what I referred to as "get it in writing", above. This agreement may also allow the project to change the license if that seems like a good idea. However, it's really important to get a good lawyer to write it if it says more than "I authorized the SFC to distribute my contributions to Darcs under 'GPLv2 or later' and my contributions to the Darcs Test Suite under the MIT license." Ie, if it allows you to change the license, it had better specify what licenses you're allowed to use in black and white and simple language, or people who care about the license will refuse to sign it because they suspect you or some future leader might take it proprietary/ permissive/copyleft (whatever it is that they don't like). _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list darcs-users@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
