Michael Meeks wrote: > On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 00:05 +0900, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote: >> But now that I think about it, since SUN holds the copyright to the >> code it would be actually possible for SUN to make modifications to >> the code without releasing it and that may well happen in StarOffice. > > Sure - so (it seems to me) rather hard for anyone except Sun to > prosecute an LGPL violation here - since it's quite possible that these > guys have a confidential agreement with Sun that makes it perfectly > legal for them to rip off people's code, and their customers, and get > away with it. How can we know that is not the case ? How can anyone be > sure if litigation was commenced, Sun wouldn't just settle for cash.
It's not so uncommon that the major contributor of a project wants to preserve the ability to relicence the code and so requires the copyright for code contributions from others. Here's another prominent example that Michael perhaps just has forgotten: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Why does Novell require a copyright assignment? When a developer contributes code to the C# compiler or the Mono runtime engine, we require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense his/her contribution under other licensing terms. This allows Novell to re-distribute the Mono source code to parties that might not want to use the GPL or LGPL versions of the code. Particularly embedded system vendors obtain grants to the Mono runtime engine and modify it for their own purposes without having to release those changes back." http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ IIRC the same is true for the Evolution project (also owned by Novell), and some other OS projects as well. At least in case of OpenOffice.org the contributor still keeps the copyright of his own code (but shares it with Sun - JCA = "Joint Copyright Assignment"). I fail to read from the quote above whether this is the case for Mono also or if the contributor completely loses his copyright to Novell (IANAL - maybe someone else is better in reading such statements). What OpenOffice.org, Mono or Evolution are doing is not "ripping off people's code". Every potential contributor knows about the copyright assignment beforehand. He is free to refrain from contributing if that doesn't suit him. I know even at least one case where a developer said that he didn't understand that (yes!) and "wanted his code back". So the OpenOffice.org team removed it from the project (though they already had invested time on helping to integrate it). That's not what I call "ripping off". OpenOffice.org also offers a way to contribute without a JCA: developers can provide extensions that can be distributed and installed separately. That's more than you can get in most other Open Source projects (including the ones I mentioned above). And more and more people are using that way as our growing extensions repository shows. In OpenOffice.org the JCA is required only for code contributed to the core product so that in case a relicencing might become necessary or desirable (e.g. a licence change from LGPLv2 to (L)GPLv3) this can be done easily. Though I tend to see the combination "legal issues" and the word "easy" as an oxymoron. And mainly because of that I also think that discussions like this one are pretty useless. So I just added my 2 cents because I think that at least the facts should be presented completely. Moreover, discussing copyright assignments only in the context of OpenOffice.org and "forgetting" other projects is unfair (to say the least). That's even worse than useless. ;-) 'nuff said. Back to work. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
