On 10/06/2011 12:50 PM, Rudy Lippan wrote: > There will also be a community aspect where individuals will > develop and contribute components, just like every other open source > project.... However, some of the contributed components may not be > eligible for copyright protections. A component might be a simple > configuration file, a pure data set, or even a full description of a > server farm with data processing and management software. > > So what I would like to do is tie the license of the software to the user > of the software respecting the licenses of the community-distributed > components > they use, whether or not the individual component is eligible for copyright > protection.
Just my two cents here, but I believe that it will be simpler (and safer) if you assume that all contributions to your project are copyrightable, and thus, needing to be under a compatible license. (Yes, I'm sure someone will feel the urge to be pedantic and point out that there are multiple assumptions in the above sentence, but please do not.) If the contributions are not copyrightable, then the license applied to those contributions is possibly irrelevant, and the widest possible range of "rights" for it apply. However, if a contribution is assumed to be non-copyrightable and no license is applied, and that turns out to be false (or false for some jurisdictions), not having the license will be extremely problematic. I also think that you should handle contribution licensing requirements separately from the copyright license of your work. I have seen too many poorly worded software copyright licenses where the intent was noble, but the implementation ended up in something that was non-Free or non-Open Source. In Fedora, we require contributors to agree to the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:FPCA), to ensure that contributions (of both code and content) accepted to Fedora are guaranteed to come with acceptable licensing terms, either via explicit licensing statement from the copyright holder or explicit agreement to the default license terms as stated in the FPCA. A similar model may work for your project, and the FPCA is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported (with section 4d waived), although if you do decide to generate a derived work, I strongly encourage you to have a lawyer sign off on it first, because Legalese != English. Hope that helps, ~tom P.S. I Am Not A Lawyer, this is not to be considered "legal advice". == Fedora Project _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
