Hello all, (apologies for this quite long email) I would like to discuss a bit the position of the Document Foundation with respect to copyright assignments. I understand there have been questions here and there about this topic, and it's perhaps necessary to explain our position.
We initially agreed not to request the assignment of copyright for code contributions, and we can only witness that it's been so far the right decision: Many developers have joined us and contribute to the LibreOffice codebase or extend it by localizing it and testing LibreOffice. We knew ever since the beginning that imposing a copyright assignment would be a big minus for developers. For one thing, it represents complexity for developers, and on the other hand, the experience we had with the copyright assignment under the stewardship of Oracle speaks for itself. It is also worth noting that in practical terms, the bulk of the LibreOffice codebase, that is, everything except our new patches, our new code, the localizations, the hacks, etc. is still under copyright from Oracle. Also, as a warning of sorts, keep in mind that copyright assignments are not the same thing as software licenses. I am going to write below some of the reasons why I also think that not having a copyright assignment is either a good idea or does not really matter at all. 1) no one has yet been able to clearly articulate what advantage we would gain by having one for TDF. For instance, it's not at all clear, and is in fact quite likely than any major software vendor would be shunned away from our project if we had a copyright assignment: it would basically mean that we would own their "intellectual property", and I'm not so sure it flies well with corporate lawyers in charge of protecting it. 2) the state of the art in terms of such assignments is changing rapidly. We stand at a corner of FOSS history, where the realization that projects led by one vendor only tend to fail, unless the vendor itself puts others in charge of the projects and gives free reins to its community. Look at what's happening with Fedora with respect to its ditching of copyright assignments. Experiences in other projects show that the "protection" that such assignments provide is at best minimal, and most of the times quickly abused, most of the time by its steward. 3) copyright assignments are not blocking the reuse of code or anything similar; there are several reasons for this, but one which is practical: a few years ago, you had a central branch with a tool like CVS. In the CVS (and even SVN) there was a real hierarchy. There was my branch and you were contributing to it. Now, many projects use similar tools, except that they are in fact quite different: they are distributed: there are as many different copies as there are developers; and the choice is social (people agree on what's best or respect the guy who has the biggest beard or something like this). So people create a big heap of code, and if they want to create their own stuff in their own corner, they do it; they don't deal with hierarchies, and paperwork. If they're not happy, they leave. That's how it works today. BTW; LibreOffice uses Git, which is a distributed SCM. 4) the notion that we cannot change license because we don't have copyright assignment needs to be put to rest once and for all today. There is a very simple explanation with respect to this issue; ask any lawyer and he/she will confirm this: Sun/Oracle has licensed the OOo code under LGPL v3. They could have put "LGPL v3 or later" or "LGPL v3 or +". But they didn't. And that's what makes impossible to turn OOo into a different license unless the sole copyright owner agrees to change it, which is unlikely with Oracle. 5) based on my 4) point, you can object that without a copyright assignment, we would be stuck with the same license for ever, since we would not be able to decide to change the license of our lines of code. In fact, the problem lies in the heap of code we would have to change in order to be able to turn the whole code into something else... but here's what the developers of LibreOffice did: they simply didn't change the license, they started to license their own changes under the same license (LGPL V3)... and added : "or +" after it. So the license will change or at least be modified that way. But what if we want to change the whole thing? well, we'll contact all the authors who got their code into LibreOffice. We have their emails, etc. And if some of them don't agree with us, then perhaps we'll have to redevelop their own code. 6) there is also a confusion between copyright assignment and copyright protection. True, when you assign code to the FSF, you do expect to be legally protected against unpleasant surprises. But developers can also decide they don't like the FSF so you will have lost your effective control over what you develop. One might object, then, that if someone sues you, you would be better off with an entity protecting you. Usually, the patent trolls and the suers on code of this world don't attack individuals. They attack entities with money. On to the money question... 7) what if we had money to protect our code? Well, we may still not want to lose developers for that. But we could do something else: acting as the defenders of all the copyright owners. And then, it does not require a copyright assignment, it only requires, if a problem arises, that enough contributors or all the contributors signs a small paper saying "The Document Foundation is representing us legally in xyz case". That's all. Your questions are welcome, but I hope it helped clarified this question. -- Charles-H. Schulz, Founding member of The Document Foundation. -- Unsubscribe instructions: Email to [email protected] Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***
