Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> wrote:
> 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,
What the FSF tries to do is illegal: you cannot transfer the "Copyright" (*).
This is forbidden by law. THe maximum you can do is to give away "exclusive
rights to use".
> 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.
If a contributor is giving away a "non-exclusive right of use" to Sun, this
should be sufficient to allow Sun to sue somebody.
I will not give exclusive rights to FSF or Sun for sources that I wrote on my
private initiative and on my expense and I do not expect that others will do
similar things with their code. I will however take care that code I wrote and
made OpenSource cannot be made closed source by others.
*) Note that "Copyright" is the wrong term but it is unfortunately the official
translation for "Urheberrecht".
J?rg
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