Hi Alex!
disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice and not an
official statement from Sun. (Gawd, I hate disclaimers - what ever
happened to common sense…?)
On Apr 27, 2009, at 6:55 AM, Alex Esterkin wrote:
Please, open Drizzle source files, one after another (I mean the
actual
Drizzle project, as opposed to, say, libdrizzle or drizzle-jdbc).
Try
finding a source tree artifact that does not have a copyright line
that
assigns the copyright to Sun (in most cases) or to MySQL (in remaining
cases).
If what you say is correct, then this is a bug, which should be
fixed by
replacing the copyright line. The correct copyright line(s) will be
different in each source file, depending on who wrote the code, for
example:
Portions Copyright (C) 1996-2008 Monty Widenius
Portions Copyright (C) 1996-2007 David Axmark
Portions Copyright (C) 2008-2009 Jay Pipes
For all of these three people copyright belongs to MySQL AB/Sun
Microsystems, Inc (since the original code of MySQL of which drizzle
was forked belongs to Sun and Monty/David/Jay worked/works for MySQL
AB and/or Sun).
If I was to submit code for example, the copyright of my contributions
would be owned by Sun, as well (but licensed as GPL2 or BSD whatever
the case might be).
Until Sun copyright message remains, the copyright is owned by Sun,
regardless of what the Drizzle wiki page says.
Huge portions _do_ belong to Sun. For those contributors who are not
affiliated with Sun, their patches should also amend the copyright
lines in the files changed or, because that might become unwieldy, in
a central AUTHORS file. Many large projects do this, they have a
"steward" organization and list contributors in a central place.
The bzr history identifies who contributed what and how much is left
of the contribution, in cases where there's dispute and stuff gets
rewritten (let's hope that this will never happen).
Nevertheless, all code in drizzle is either GPL or BSD licensed with
all of their consequences, regardless of who owns the copyright. The
same thing applies to the public MySQL code on Launchpad and elsewhere.
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:18 AM, Sheeri K. Cabral
<[email protected]> wrote:
According to the FAQ,
http://drizzle.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_this_a_product_of_Sun.2FMySQL.3F
and
http://drizzle.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_the_copyright_of_my_code_assigned_to_MySQL_or_to_Sun.3F
Drizzle is not a Sun project, and the copyright of Drizzle is GPL2
with community contributions being BSD.
In my understanding "Drizzle is not a Sun product" means that Sun does
not require any form of copyright assignment, but simply sponsors
development by assigning people to work on it fulltime.
(Of course Sun also occasionally sponsors space, pizza and sodas like
on last Friday - hooray :))
Alex, are you concerned that Sun will turn around and take your
contributions? IANAL, but my understanding is that this would be too
late anyway:
Drizzle is available under a GPL license and the bzr history contains,
hopefully signed, commits from non-Sun employees, thus making it
impossible for any current or future owner of Sun to simply take the
code and run. Which is the whole reason for the existence of the GPL.
I'm sure Sun's lawyers could clarify this, but I wouldn't bother.
Without a doubt management has done all the necessary work before this
project was started.
cheers,
-k
-Sheeri
On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Alex Esterkin <[email protected]>
wrote:
The vast majority of Drizzle source files display a copyright line
followed
by a standard GPL2 license statement and disclosure.
In most cases, the copyright line reads as one of the following:
Copyright (C) 2008 Sun Microsystems
Copyright (C) 2008 MySQL
Copyright (C) 2000-2006 MySQL AB
Is it accurate to say that Drizzle copyright is owned by Sun?
Thanks.
Regards,
Alex Esterkin
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--
- Sheeri K. Cabral
http://tinyurl.com/mysqlbook will take you to the Amazon.com page for
my upcoming book, "MySQL Administrator's Bible".
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Kay Roepke
Software Engineer, MySQL Enterprise Tools
Sun Microsystems GmbH Sonnenallee 1, DE-85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Thomas Schroeder, Wolfang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitz d. Aufs.rat.: Martin Haering HRB MUC 161028
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