On Tuesday, February 15, 2005 3:28 am, Richard Brown wrote: > Have you seen this slightly out of date page? > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright/
I believe I read it once, however after reading it again just now, the following section seems to be especially relevant: "To summarize: copyright assignment refers to the process of legally changing the ownership of intellectual property, such as a piece of code, to a new entity. In this case, it involves reassignment from contributors to the organization. This is a necessary step to ensure that Gentoo is legally able to pursue and defend against litigation. Towards this end, it is necessary to obtain signed copyright assignment from individual contributors. The signed document does two things: it turns copyright over to Gentoo Technologies, Inc., and in return it guarantees that the contributed works will never be relicensed under a license materially different from the GNU General Public License (or, in the case of documentation, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License). This allows the Gentoo community to take action to correct those who may knowingly or unknowingly violate the licensing terms of our works, while also ensuring that these works continue to be available under licensing terms that you fully support -- even when the ownership of these works are eventually transferred to another entity. " I suggest that anyone interested in this issue read the linked document, above. The policy outlined therein is currently not being followed in an entirely legal manner, and although I don't believe there are many here who fundamentally disagree with the overall principle of contribution to Gentoo, "in-spirit" copyright assignment isn't enough. If we're going to maintain the legal integrity of the tree and all of the software that's produced under Gentoo, proper copyright assignment, in writing, needs to be encouraged and enforced on all new submissions, whether by CVS, bug reports or any other medium. -- Anthony Gorecki Ectro-Linux Foundation
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