Erik Trimble <[email protected]> wrote: > > In the European Copyright law as well as in the US Copyright law, you need > > to have a decsion that get's a majority of the contribution (not from lines > > but from Copyright relevant creation) and all contributors with more than > > aprox. 5% contributions need to vote for the change. > > > > I cannot speak for GNOME, but for e.g. the Linux kernel, you would need > > much less than 50 pro votes. > > > > Jörg > > > > > That's not true for US Law. I went through this process awhile ago for > some textual material (a compilation book), and several US IP Lawyers > were very much in agreement that *every* author had to give explicit > permission to publish or change anything that they owned copyright on. > The US doesn't have any concept of "abandonware" or "community rights" > to a copyright. The author has full ownership of the work, and the only > non-authorized use of such a work is in the very narrow statutory > exemptions (commonly called "fair use"). Relicensing without explicit > permission would be a very cut-and-dried lawsuit win for the aggrieved > author of the relicensed work here in the US.
Ask Simon Phipps.... He told me that there is a paper from Eric Raymonds wife (who is a lawyer) that confirms my statement. The background in the European law is that a minor contributor does not get the right to control the "way of marketing" and the coice of the license is (in a OSS project) the "way of marketing". Minor contributors only have the right to receive a fractional part of the revenue from marketing the software but cannot control how this is done. Jörg -- EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [email protected] (uni) [email protected] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
