Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> The SCA itself is something intended to grant co-ownership of IP rights
> to Sun. I'd rather not codify this particular relationship between
> contributors and Sun in our constitution, if we can help it. Speaking
> as a community member (rather than a Sun employee), it seems like it
> should be perfectly reasonable to contribute code to OpenSolaris without
> an SCA -- I don't think the "community" in particular gets any extra
> value from the SCA -- all it does is give Sun the ability not to be
> bound by the original CDDL on contributions. (This power can be used
> for good or ill . A good example might be an upgrade to the license
> language if CDDL were found to be legally indefensible. An obvious
> example of ill would be if Sun decides to stop investing in OpenSolaris
> and develop an exclusively closed-source version of Solaris -- note that
> I don't think that this is particularly likely.) Therefore, Sun's
> requirement for an SCA on file doesn't (IMO) necessarily translate well
> to any intrinsic requirement from the community.
I think having a single entity able to relicense the code base does
provide the community a benefit, which is why it's seen in other communities,
like the FSF copyright assignment for contributions to GNU projects,
but I don't think Sun has to be that entity for it to work - the community
could benefit from a non-profit foundation owning the copyright as well, but
I don't think it's likely that Sun will give away something as valuable as
its co-ownership of the Solaris sources.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
