David Johnson scripsit: > 1) Each author retains copyright for their non-trivial contribution. Since we > will probably use the BSD license, this does not create a huge problem. But > would the package as-a-whole need a distinct copyright holder? Would a > generic "Ogham Development Team" suffice, or is something much more formal > needed?
If the package-as-a-whole is made up of separately copyrighted modules, then it could only get a thin "compilation copyright" controlling selection (and ordering, irrelevant for software). So with this copyright you could prevent people from putting *exactly the same* set of modules together. This is kinda pointless. Don't worry about it. > 2) Once person is copyright holder, and everyone else needs to assign > contributions to him or her. This is what GNU does. One problem with this is > deciding who gets to be the copyright holder. Another problem is the > administrative hassle of assigning the copyrights over. We want to make > contributing as painless as possible. Any document in writing saying "I assign all my copyright interest in <project> to <recipient>" is probably sufficient, assuming you are not going to sue one another. IANAL, TINLA. > 3) Create an umbrella group to hold the copyright. Does this need to be a > formal foundation or non-profit? Do contributions still need their copyrights > assigned over, or could the group act as the "compiler" of the compilation? I think it pretty much needs to be a corporation (legal person). Probably not worth doing for just one small project. When you have lots of projects like FSF or Apache, then it's worthwhile. > I've done a quick survey of some OSS projects, and their all either seem to > the second since they were initially started by a single individual, or the > third since they grew considerably in size. Linux is the best-known example of the first case: the parts are under varying copyright ownership and with varying (though all GPL-compatible) licenses. -- What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the John Cowan sound of a [Ww]all that people have stopped [EMAIL PROTECTED] banging their head against? --Larry http://www.ccil.org/~cowan -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
