Hi Mathias,
On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 10:33 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
> >| By accepting an SCA, Sun
> >|
> >| * promises that your contributions will remain Free and open-source
> >| software (i.e. will be published and will remain available by Sun
> >| under a Free or open-source software license).
Which as we all know is meaningless beyond the "here, you can have your
own patch back, under the license you gave it to us" - this can be
relatively easily achieved with a backup tape, a public svn archive or
somesuch. It sounds nice, but it gives no assurance.
On the other hand, I would agree that it's possible to make a case that
Sun presents their legal position clearly - yet there is a large degree
of smoke & mirrors around how this relates to "community", and the
empowerment of that IMHO (and growing corporate contributions).
I'm not convinced as Allen says that many developers realise that
Butler may be acting perfectly legally and within rights Sun have given
them.
> But a clarification of the implications of the JCA wasn't what Michael
> Meeks asked for (and BTW also nobody else until now). He pointed at
> Sun for asking for a JCA without mentioning that his company is doing
> exactly the same in other projects. I felt the need to correct that
> false impression.
As you know from my blog, I've been extremely up-front about this (much
as, incidentally, I disapprove of & would improve Novell's copyright assignment
practices around evolution & mono):
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2007-10-02
which I excerpt:
"We work closely with Sun's (excellent) engineers on joint
development projects such as OpenXML import, VBA interop, core
application features, re-factoring old code etc. To put it
another way - we know Sun re-licenses this code as proprietary
software, for it's own advantage, and we like our friends to be
*** able to eat. **** Novell even uses a similar structure in two
*** other very limited scenarios: for a tiny fraction of Mono, and
*** for evolution. ****"
"What we don't like is the insistence that all and any
contributed code, shipped at OpenOffice.org must end up being
owned by Sun."
There are substantial differences in practice between Sun & Novell's
approach here - but clearly as I've written before aggregating ownership
is often sensible (depending on licensing) - it's the fair exercise of
stewardship of those rights that is the more interesting thing. Hence my
original question:
"How can we know that is not the case ?"
[ that Sun have not licensed to Butler ]
A question apparently no-one seems eager to answer interestingly.
HTH,
Michael.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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