Markus wrote: >> in the incubator list the question came up if GRASS Development team >> is legal entity to which the copyright can be assigned.
While not a legal entity per se (that's a big reason why we joined OSGeo) it's a clear moral entity with RFC rules & regs, history, etc. if a community dispute ever arose. I always added the ", and the GRASS Development Team" to the copyright statement on stuff I wrote so that it was clear that in my absence I was cool with the rest of the collective dev team's wishes, but that also if I wanted to (re)use some of my own code somewhere else one day, that I hadn't fully ceded my own rights to it. (not that I ever planned to, but at least this way I never have to worry about reusing my own work/ideas/techniques in other personal projects) >> At time the GRASS Development team is not an incorporated entity >> usually the first copyright holder name in the source code files is >> the initial author followed by the GRASS Development team. >> If that's legally sufficient I cannot sat nor what the implications are. I guess the practical question is without a separate author listed do we have full standing to sue/pursue someone violating/abusing the GPL? (but since we have full CVS/SVN history going back to the introduction of GPL GRASS c.'99, tracking down the actual contributor isn't a real problem) Is there any code outside of the addons repo that *only* lists the GRASS dev team as the author and no one else? And if so, wouldn't the main COPYING and GPL.TXT files already blanket cover anything within a release tarball anyway? i.e. is this actually an issue? My understanding of why individual code files had (c) statements was to make it easy to avoid mistakes where individual files on file systems getting copied over and the GPL providence forgotten. With it there it takes a positive physical action to 'forget' the authorship. But even if it weren't, the code (or icon image for example) would still be blanked covered by the COPYING file. And thus we should perhaps put forward that OSGeo should have all member projects' COPYING files reviewed by a FOSS lawyer for validity &/or common mistakes. Michael wrote: > Also, since OSGeo is in the US, does that mean that all GRASS has to comply > with Us copyright laws? Many authors are not from the US. How does this work > in an international Open Source project. I think GRASS has to comply with US copyright law as long as we distribute creative works to anyone with the US*. Regarding other countries I'd suspect that the number of countries we'd have to deal with that are not party to the Berne Convention is beyond our worry. So we can just consider the international case. [*] in practice anyway. Authors with a physical presence, authors traveling there, and OSGeo being 501c4 registered there makes the jurisdiction question rather moot. But I'm not a lawyer. The fine folks at the SFLC are though, if this was a matter we were ever really worried about or had to deal with. best regards, Hamish _______________________________________________ grass-psc mailing list [email protected] https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-psc
