Hello Stefan,
Thank you for your feedback.
> thank you for your passionate reaction. I believe that you share the same
> passion for Open Source software and the OpenERP products in particular as we
> do.
Yes, and I take this opportunity to also thank you for the great contrib you
did too.
> It is vital for us to contribute to the OpenERP framework and the core
> modules, so we would always prefer the option of copyright assignment in a
> contributor agreement. You raise a number of valid issues with regards to
> protecting the OpenERP products against copyright violations and other
> problems which argue in favour of such copyright assignment. I do not think
> that anyone can argue against them, and it is for such reasons that projects
> like Plone and KDE may ask for copyright assignment in a contributor
> agreement.
Actually, my preferred solution is the public domain for small contributions to
the framework or the official modules.
I think it's very boring to ask people to sign a document and send us by
fax/mail just because they contributed a few lines of code -> doing contracts
with community members is not the way I see a good collaboration (this was the
reason why we did not made it before: we supposed that if a contributor did not
put a copyright in his code, merge proposal or patch, it is considered public
domain)
But I understand some may prefer a contributor agreement. If some wants a
contributor agreement, I propose to use the one of the FSFE. Does anybody have
any bad feedback about this contributor agreement ?
So, my question is: is it ok for you to put contributions to the framework or
official addons in the public domain or you prefer a contributor agreement ?
(of course, your own modules should be under your own copyright)
> However, the problem is that assigning copyrights to a commercial entity does
> not always help when the issues that you mention occur. We know you
> personally to be a great proponent of Open Source but your successor or your
> creditors may not. OpenERP SA may be sold to a different party, or take up a
> very different attitude for some other reason. When that happens, and OpenERP
> SA has all the copyrights, we will never be able to update the license to
> protect the OpenERP products or enforce the licenses in court.
OpenERP SA will not be sold to third parties, I own a significant part of the
shares to ensure that. The biggest risk for OpenERP SA is not to be sold but to
fail building a profitable business model allowing to sustain the fast
evolution of the OpenERP product. In that case OpenERP may finish like GNUe,
adempiere, ... in a few years. That would be the worst scenario in my opinion.
But even if it is (suppose I die in an accident), it does not change the fact
that OpenERP is currently under AGPLv3. Nobody can change this.
> If we follow best practices in open source, then we set up a non-profit
> membership organisation as in the case of Plone and KDE, for contributors to
> assign their copyrights to. The FSFE/KDE agreement [1] would be perfect for
> that.
By doing that, you may have the invert effect than what you expect:
* the more people are involved in a decision, the less chances you have to make
the evolution -> if 50% of the contributors have to agree to change from
AGPLv3 to a potential AGPLv4, you have a risk that you can never upgrade. I
would never take this risks for OpenERP
* I don't imaging starting a discussion to define the status of such an
organisation. It would be a long debate and we all have more important things
to do than legal researches, discussion on status, official meetings and votes,
...
* just imagine the questions you have to cover in the status:
- who can join ? --> those that commit more than 1% of the lines of
code (then there would be only OpenERP) ? what do you do if a lot of devs from
microsoft that contribute and join the association ?
- how do you take take desisions ? 80% of votes according to the
importance of the contributor based on the lines of code --> then only OpenERP
sa can take the decisions.
- who will pay the costs of the organization ? what will be the budget
and forecasted costs ? how can the association enforce the protection of the
license in a court ? --> this can quickly costs more than 100k$
- what's the responsibilities of the organization ? it is logic that the
one who get the copyright ensure the evolution of his code.
- if the association decide to remove the "private use" clause of
OpenERP Enterprise, who will pay my developers that are partly financed by this
? If nobody, who will ensure OpenERP will grow quickly in the future.
As a summary, we clearly all have more important things to do than this. I
don't want OpenERP community to enter in such debates, it's a waste of time.
What do you think about putting all small contributions to official modules and
framework in the public domain ? this is the best solution as it does not
require a copyright assignment (to OpenERP SA or to an association).
This solution is also very fair as a contributor can apply a special licence
for his own code (that he may use in others softwares) and we can put his code
in the core without having to ask a contributor agreement signature. We protect
both the unity of OpenERP and the personnal contrib of each one.
--
Fabien
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