Hey everyone, As part of a purely administrative detail, I just read this [1] article by the FSFE on copyright assignment and how it should be handled.
The general gist of the article is that for each project, there should a created a non-for-profit foundation managed by a council or board (what we have now with the Compiz Council) which manages copyrights and legal issues. All code copyright should be re-assigned to this foundation as part of a contributor agreement. For example /* Compiz plugin 'group' * * group.cpp * * Copyright (c) 2010 The OpenCompositing Foundation * Authors: Danny Baumann [general idea] <email> * Dennis Kasprzyk [nice animations] <email> * Patrick Nikalaus [cairoization] <email> * Roi Cohen [cairoization] <email> * Sam Spilsbury [ported to compiz 0.9] <email> * * This code is licenced under the GPL v2 blah blah blah */ What this does in effect is grant a copyright licence to 'The OpenCompositing Foundation' which is to be run by the Compiz Council. I feel that this would be effective in case we ever needed to change the licence of our code since what the project has found is that a lot of past developers have dropped out-of-contact. This means that trying to change the licence or any legal issues pertaining to the copyright of the code could become a lot more difficult if those developers cannot be contacted for any reason - especially if a decision is made with the licence of the code that they do not agree to retroactively. The OpenCompositing Foundation [or whatever we want to call it] would be run the Compiz Council as it stands - which should be re-elected at certain time-periods to reflect the people who are really running the show [As I'll address in my next mail to the list] I know this sounds administrative and fairly boring, but considering our circumstances, it makes a lot of sense to do it this way. Kind Regards, Sam [1] http://blogs.fsfe.org/adridg/?p=628 -- Sam Spilsbury _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.compiz-fusion.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
