Ühel kenal päeval, E, 24.10.2016 kell 19:07, kirjutas Rich Freeman: > On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Matt Turner <matts...@gentoo.org> > wrote: > > > > In order to contribute to GNU projects, one must sign a copyright > > assignment statement. > > > > Gentoo doesn't have anything similar as far as I'm aware, which > > makes > > me question the legitimacy of "Gentoo Foundation" copyrights. > > > > What is the story? > > > > The story of what? > > Are you asking whether they're legally binding? You'd have to sue > somebody to find out, because as far as I'm aware the matter is > untested in court. I think you could make an argument that > voluntarily placing that header on your work is an assignment of > copyright. You could also argue otherwise. A court would decide who > wins. > > Personally I'd rather move to an explicit system.
Why do we care about an explicit copyright system at all? The copyright holder having licensed the work under our GPL-2 license or a license that allows to re-license to GPL-2 is what matter to us. That should be explicit, not chasing some explicit copyright headers and whatnot specifically. Projects that want explicit copyright or copyright assignments or CLAs are those that want to be able to re-license the code without getting permissions from everyone (some of whom might not be possible to contact at a future date) or be able to sue someone for license violations without the original developers of the affected parts having to be involved. Are we pursuing those option, or why do we care? Having all copyrightable work explicitly licensed or possible to re- license to our chosen license is what matter. We don't need bogus or non-bogus copyright headers, just a "Gentoo project and contributors" copyright notice or optionally allowing explicit ones to those that want it, together with a license notice. That's so that people looking at some file know what license it is, etc, and not run off copying it into their incompatible license stuff or whatever. And yes, the headers are currently completely bogus. You can consider it to be as such to any file I have contributed copyrightable work to, and the Gentoo Foundation does not have copyright to such work of mine. It may however use it under the terms of the GPL-2 license. IANAL, Mart
