Caveat: I am not a lawyer, I'm just speaking from my own experience here (as Secretary of the Subversion Corporation, we've been dealing with lots of issues like these, chatting with lawyers...) If you want "official" legal advice, you need to consult your own lawyer.
Anyone who contributes code to an open source project retains their copyright. So if N people all work on a source file, they all hold joint copyright on it together, each over their respective pieces. That's why most big open source projects are generally a mish-mash of copyright ownership, held jointly by dozens or hundreds of people. It's impossible to "give up" your copyright unless somebody gets you to sign a document where you explicitly do so. (Say, a record label asking a musician to "transfer" their copyright to the corporation.) What many well-organized open-source projects do is create an umbrella organization (i.e the Apache Software Foundation, the Subversion Corporation, etc.) and then require all code contributors to sign a "Contributor License Agreement" (CLA). This isn't a transfer of copyright, but more like a "duplication" of copyright: you give the organization "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute" your contribution. In other words, you don't give up your original copyright, but the organization gets unlimited rights to use it however they wish. Google itself requires CLAs from contributors for open source projects that it runs. So does the ASF, SVN Corp, and so on. An example of the SVN corp's CLA is here (which is almost identical to Google's): http://www.subversion.org/legal/individual-cla.html Really, this is all a big headache and complete overkill for small projects. Just understand that it doesn't really matter what you put at the top of the file: it could say "(C) The Easter Bunny"... but if it ever came down to a dispute in a real court case, everyone would still recognize that the copyright actually belongs to everyone who contributed code to the file. It would be fairly easy to prove who wrote what. It's sort of silly to worry about. That's why I suggested just putting "(C) Foo project, under the terms of the GPL. See COPYING for license terms and COMMITTERS for a list of contributors." This keeps things legal, sane, and prevents people from "owning" certain files. As in Karl's book, people want and deserve recognition -- but it's best to do it on a project-wide basis so as to develop a "collective project ego" rather than individual egos. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hosting at Google Code" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
