On Sep 26, 2004, at 3:45 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:I would like to see formal assignment of copyright to the ASF happen. The concept of (c) completely held by the ASF is what distinguishes us from pretty much everything else out there. W/o that, I don't believe that we can relicense anything, as an example, without a specific side-agreement from each contributor for which a (c) is in the license or notice file. That's an administrative headache I'm not interested in.
You mean something like the following?
Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Foundation and to recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.
That's been included in the Software Grant and Contributor License Agreements to date.
That's a license for the work, not a transfer of ownership of the copyright for the work.
Hopefully, we can agree that the original contributor retains a copyright on their original work. In this case, I mean any copy of CloudScape that existed prior to Derby.
It seems that we'd have to do a transfer and license back to IBM.
Hopefully, we can agree that the ASF is free to assert a copyright on any combined or derived works. By that, I mean Derby.
There is no question we can assert copyright on the combined work, but that still means we are distributing what is [right now] ~100% (c) IBM code.
W/o transfer of copyright to the ASF, we'd simply be redistributing IBMs copyrighted work. I can certainly see the argument that it isn't so bad, as the software is under the AL2, but this is a departure from how we historically operate, or so we believed.
The issue that we should be discussing whether the original copyright holder has a right to license the code to the ASF conditional on a NOTICE requirement.
I think that with any software grant, we certainly should mention the source in the NOTICE as a way of saying 'thanks!', but that we should require transfer of copyright to the ASF.
geir
- Sam Ruby
-- Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
