On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Mark Struberg <[email protected]> wrote: >> "Copyright 2011, Red Hat, Inc. and/or its >> affiliates, and individual contributors by the @authors tag". > > > To clarify this as well. This doesn't mean a 'shared' ownership! Usually this > wording in an OSS license is used to express that both the projects hosting > and managing partner (Red Hat) AS WELL as the original author have _full_ > rights on this work (the authors of course only for the part they did).
I thought I had responded to this, only to find the response languishing as a draft. Jason, Pete, Shane, and their manager Mark Little are currently CC'd on an email discussion between myself and RH OSS attorney Richard Fontana. Their position is that RH does indeed hold the copyright as an owner rather than as a mere licensee. So far I have seen no indication that they intend to share copyright with the individual authors, but I have now fired the question pretty much point-blank, so if my current understanding is mistaken in that regard, we'll know it soon enough. > > Basically this says: Red Hat gets all rights to use this software, but the > original author _remains_ all this rights as well! > > Otherwise Red Hat could not do _anything_ without first asking _all_ > contributors (on the very class) for allowance first ;) > > So if Pete, Stuart and Jason originally wrote it and agreed to contribute > this code, then all is well. > > Of course, having the ok from Red Hat as well would make things easier - > because then we would not need to scan all the files history to check if only > iCLA signees have touched it. Not just easier--if their individual employees do not share copyright, it is essential! I have raised the issue on incubator-general yesterday. If I don't receive a response today, I'll escalate to legal-discuss. As it stands now, we need to know what, if any, explicit assurance we need from RH that their CCLA is applicable to code-relevant-to-DeltaSpike. Maybe it will turn out that I've been overly paranoid and the CCLA is all we need, but this strikes me as telling your children they can have one cookie, and they turn around and eat the whole box. Thanks again to all for participating, being patient, and having faith that there *is* a point to all this, and that once we get it resolved we can move on to the fun stuff! Matt > > LieGrue, > strub
