>>Alain: YES and no. There could be some bickering. A
>>difference of opinion concerning the importance of the
>>contribution made by someone that wishes to be cited
>>as one of the authors.
Anthony: Alain, in that event we would have the list decide on what to
do.
Alain: OK, but what kind of decision-making process are you
envisionning? A voting CGI in order to establish the opinion of the
majority and act accordingly? This could lead to Majority-Rule.
Bottom-line is that we are going to have to discuss the (political)
issue of decision-making, as part of the Collaboration section of our
group, before, during and after we decide which licencing terms to
adopt.
Anthony: Our choice would be to reject or accept the patch...
Alain: Exactly. The Copyright Holder decides whether patches will be
integrated into the Standard Distribution, or not.
Anthony: ... because the author owns the rights to it.
Alain: Unless he decides that he wants to contribute it and we decide
to integrate it into the Standard Distribution. From then on, it is the
OC licence prevails. The author cannot change his mind afterwards and
retract his contribution.
Anthony: If we reject it, we can't add it in.
Alain: Right. We cannot add his instance of the idea, as-is or only
slightly modified. But it should be noted that ideas are not
copyright-able. Only the expression of that idea is copyright-able.
Anthony: Now imagine if that was a small fix to a long-standing
annoying bug that we rejected. We could _never_ use that code to fix
the bug! Even if it were inserting a few lines, we could get hauled
into court for using it (or re-writing it after having seen his fix).
Alain: If you use his source, then you are infringing his copyright
but, on the other hand, if you are merely engineering something
similar, then that is perfectly legitimate. If it wasn�t, we would be
in big trouble with Apple, eh!
Anthony: Subjective decisions are not good. Neither is a list of a
thousand
copyright holders. We still need to get the enforcement & licencing
questions answered, btw.
Alain: I totally agree.
>>Alain: I suggest that the Copyright Holder's mail
>>address be a mailing list that forwards mail to all
>>members that are designated as Copyright Holders.
>>Everyone gets notified, and the mailing list address
>>and server are maintained by the group
>>(forever current).
>Trouble is, what if someone leaves OpenCard without
>leaving a new address? We should make sure that we're
>not stalled then.
Alain: What do they do in the case of books written by several authors?
I doubt that the editor or distributor are obliged to track down the
authors if they change their address. And a missing author would not
prevent the book from being sold.
Anthony : Hah! I'd call that spam. We'd be sending out thousands of
messages a day. Everytime someone sends a message, a hundred copies go
out... great.
Alain: No ... no ... The Open Source licencing does not require that
the authors be contacted. You said so yourself. They would only need to
be contacted when someone would like to negotiate licencing terms that
are not already provided for ( e.g. an infrequent exception that the
Perl Artistic Licence already provides for). Bottom-line is that there
is very little need to contact the authors, so there will be very
little mail received in this regard.
Alain: Incidentally, SPAM is �unsollicited junk E-mail that wants you
to part with some of your money�. Inquiries and licencing negotiations
with the authors are not spam, despite the fact that commercialization
is the probable goal of parties that are seeking an exception to the OC
licence, at the very least because this E-mail is not UN-sollicited.
Alain: I may have mis-attributed the above paragraphs. They are either
by Anthony or by Uli or a mix of the two. Does not change my comments
in any way.
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
