On 8/22/05, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 22 August 2005 20:04, Timothy Miller wrote: > > > > We are NOT discussing the ASIC right now. We are discussing the C++ > > model that will be open source from the beginning. The model will be > > published under a proprietary license with the provision that ANYONE > > can convert it to GPL at ANY TIME. To me, it's under a proprietary > > license. To you, it's either that license or the GPL, as you please. > > That doesn't make sense. If you are the copyright owner, then you own the > copyrights, and you don't need to give yourself a licence to do something, > because you already have all the rights. So, as long as you own the > copyrights to everything, you can publish it under the terms of the GPL, and > still do anything you like with it, including publishing it under a > different, proprietary licence.
It's patches submitted by community members I'm interested in having rights to. Yes, I know I already have rights to my own work, but if someone else modifies it under the terms of the GPL, then I have to get permission from them to use it under different terms. > If you do not own the copyrights to everything, then the owners of the > copyrights of the parts that you don't own need to give you a licence to use > their stuff in proprietary works, and everyone else a licence to use it under > the GPL. Additionally, they have the right to licence out their parts to > third parties under their own licence. That is, unless these parts can be > considered derived works of the rest of the work, in which case they must > publish them under the GPL only. That could get hairy with multiple > contributors. Hence the dual-license and the automatic granting of rights to Traversal. If you want to change it and NOT give me permission to use your changes, then you can just host the fork on your own server, and I won't look at your changes. > > > If you want to contribute to the project as it's going, you can submit > > your changes under MY license, and then they'll instantly come back > > out and be available under GPL if you choose. > > > > All I'm trying to do is pull a TrollTech or MySQL, but with a slightly > > different set of priorities. People don't have a problem with > > TrollTech, so they shouldn't have a problem with what we're doing. > > Perhaps I'm going about this wrong. Perhaps it should be under GPL, > > and I can refuse to accept contributions into my tree if I don't get > > from you the permission I need. That's what TrollTech and MySQL do. > > Would you prefer it that way? I just don't want to have to mess about > > with making sure everyone's given me permission. > > The problem is that by default, the creator of a work owns the copyright. > Unless they explicitly sign it over to you, or licence that work to you under > a specific licence, all rights are reserved. That is why Linus created all > this signing-off stuff on patches that go into the kernel. You can of course > refuse patches if they don't come with an appropriate licence. You could make > people who have SVN access sign an agreement that anything they enter into > SVN is under a specific licence, and that if it isn't they're liable, not > you. It may be good enough to just have the clause in the comments in the source file. Signing off is good too. If someone wants to submit a patch but not give me rights to it, I can just politely ask them to not submit the patch to the mailing list. :) > > All in all, I don't think it's too much of a burden to require people who > submit anything more than a one-liner patch to include a simple statement > that they give you a licence or that they sign over the copyrights to you. Sure. How about some boilerplate: "I hereby grant Traversal Technology full rights to the enclosed." Something like that. And if someone submits a patch without that or something similar, I'll just ignore it. If they submit it directly to SVN, I'm going to assume they're implicitly granting rights, because that's covered in the copyright notice anyhow. > > Incidentally, it seems to me that what you're trying to do is a lot like what > Netscape does with Mozilla. How about a modified MPL, with the GPL in a > dual-licence? Maybe so. I'm just not familar enough with the MPL. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
