At 12:38 PM -0600 on 7/25/99, Scott Raney wrote:
>You all seem to be spinning your wheels a little on the copyright
>issue, so I thought I try to give you a little push:
>
>1) The copyright owner must be the organization, *not* individual
>contributors. This eliminates all the "getting permission"
>requirements you seem to be stuck on.
Or a single individual. But I agree that many contributers is silly.
>
>2) The idea that the people making bigger contributions will have some
>special rights to control what happens in the organization or to the
>code is completely bogus. The members of the organization will govern
>what happens *as a group*. If they decide that Uli or Anthony or
>anyone else becomes more trouble than they're worth, they'll vote to
>strip that person of all rights and responsibilities and there's not a
>damn thing the individual will be able to do about it.
Except fork, I'd hope.
>
>3) The contributions of patches and additions must all be to the
>organization, and must require the submitter give up any personal
>rights to the contributed code whether the organization decides to use
>the code or not. This should be explicitly specified in the
>organizational charter. If you want extra protection against
>lawsuits, require all contributions to be made through a WWW page
>where the submitter has to read this requirement and click on an "I
>accept" button.
I disagree. I believe they should be required to give a non-exclusive,
perpetual, irrevocable licence to use the code, but that they should still
retain their rights to it.
In other words, they should give up control of how it is used by OpenCard
-- but they should still be allowed to use their code as they please.
Of course, if the licence were liberal enough, giving up the copyright
would not be a problem.
