Hi Andrea,
Firstly - sorry for a long delay before replying; believe it or not, in
all the work of going live I forgot to subscribe to discuss, and so
never saw your mail. Anyhow - after digging it out of the archive, let
me set that right; you make some good points.
On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 13:57 +0200, Andrea Pescetti wrote:
> On 02/10/2010 Dr. Bernhard Dippold wrote:
> > Q: What are copyright agreements (CA/JCA/SCA) with Oracle and why are
> > they counterproductive to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and FOSS?
So - in my view they are profoundly counter-productive, although they
can have some benefits; I wrote a huge screed on the subject here:
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/copyright-assignment.html
> 1) Oracle will never be able to sue LibreOffice for patent violations,
> and this is true thanks to a copyright agreement. OOo 1.x-2.x was
> distributed under LGPL 2.1 and Sun could update the licence to LGPL 3,
> when OOo 3.x was released, only because of the copyright agreements in
> place.
So - this is true; but -horribly- misleading IMHO. Yes it is certainly
the case that re-licensing was only possible because they owned the
rights: but then, if they had not owned the rights - they would
necessarily have used a plus-license - which also allows re-licensing to
future versions. So - I think this argument is extremely circular.
True - in choosing the LGPLv3 they took advantage of the grandfathering
clause, and simultaneously gave us an excellent explicit patent grant.
IMHO an implicit grant is present in the LGPLv2 too - but - lets not
split hairs here ;-)
> 2) Copyright Agreements/Assignments are commonplace in Free Software.
Again - they are not that common-place. The vast majority of
free-software projects I've worked with, and arguably the ones with the
most dynamic communities - do not have these agreements in place.
> The Mozilla Foundation, if I recall correctly, does not require an
> explicit copyright assignment,
You do recall correctly; They have a contributor agreement - but it is
mostly useless, since it applies only to those committing the code, not
the original copyright owners :-)
> but reserves the right to change the license at any time (MPL, Article 11).
Right ! Of course both Oracle and IBM are clearly happy with the MPL,
despite the originators having eclectic ownership - since they currently
ship a -huge- chunk of this code inside OpenOffice.org in the form of
Mozilla.
This is one of the reasons that we ask people to use an
LGPLv3+/MPL dual-license for their code contributions. Clearly if this
situation was acceptable for OpenOffice.org, demanding something
different of LibreOffice appears to have little legal basis.
> The main flaw with the (improving over time) Sun/Oracle Copyright
> Agreements/Assignments was that the entity in control was a company, not
> a democratic, independent, trustworthy foundation.
Completely agreed. I have some sympathy for the FSF's assignment; but I
still believe it substantially retards contribution, and is ulimately
un-necessary.
> I believe that the
> Document Foundation, once formally established, will totally deserve my
> trust, and I think I won't have any regrets in sharing with the Document
> Foundation the copyright over my contributions, and this will also make
> the Document Foundation stronger.
Well - I'm encouraged that you place that much trust in TDF :-)
personally, I have no problem with you assigning your rights to TDF, or
even the FSF [ this used to happen in the past voluntarily for GNOME -
although almost no-one took up this option ].
> B - Rewrite the answer (I use Jonathon's text as a basis) as:
Some great suggestions here.
> C - Kindly ask the the Document Foundation's stakeholders, when they
> define the official policy, to avoid presenting Copyright
> Agreements/Assignments as inherently bad: very respectable Foundations
> promoting Free Software do use them, in the interest of their projects,
> and a trustworthy Foundation should not be afraid to ask for them.
Again - I believe that aggregating this ownership right in the hands of
(even) a well regulated, and governed non-profit is potentially risky.
If the argument goes: they will never use it, so why not ? it makes me
wonder why ? :-)
If the argument is that there is some negotiation with Oracle that this
makes possible - then, I have to wonder why Oracle is happy to ship
millions of lines of Mozilla code (under the MPL) that they can never
own as part of the product.
So - in summary; I think this issue can get blown out of proportion.
Currently - we have no way of stopping people assigning their copyright
to whomever they wish - even Oracle :-) but we do ask for plus
licensing, to remove this "cannot change the license in future" red
herring.
Anyhow - thanks for starting a great thread; sorry I missed the mail,
would love to hear your riposte :-) and wonderful to have you on board.
All the best,
Michael.
--
michael.me...@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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