Louis Suarez-Potts wrote:
What exactly is the problem with the JCA?
FWIW, we actually do not much encounter the same resistance to it as we did with the old CA, which had no "joint" element. The JCA is a *joint* copyright assignment, it does not ask the user to give away his or her work, as she retains it.
<sarcasm> Whooo hoo, you get to keep the copyright for your own work. Now that's a selling point </sarcasm>
Suppose you are a coder, or proto-coder, and are hesitantly thinking of contributing to OOo. You probably don't trust Sun much. But perhaps you'll provide a simple addon, and see how it goes. Now, it turns out that you must allow Sun to also have ownership of your work, you must print this piece of paper saying so, and /physically/ mail it accross the world to Calfornia. And you do this with the full knowledge that it will be released under a license that permits propietary derivatives, and that if Sun likes your work, they can include it into StarOffice but leave OOo out of it.
That's a barrier.
I haven't signed the JCA, I'm not confortable with it. Other people won't be either. I think it's fair to say that I trust Sun more than the avarage FOSS coder. If the JCA makes me unconfortable, it will also make other people unconfortable.
I think that at least for add-ons, the JCA could be removed. OOo already ships with third-party products that Sun doesn't own the copyright to (e.g. Python). The same thing could be done for add-ons.
Cheers, Daniel.
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