I haven't had much experience dealing with these kind of issues, but maybe this can help some. The license that we (SCEA) use for the COLLADA DOM has a special clause about providing contributions that eliminates this potential copyright problem. Something similar might be able to work for OSG, Producer, and OpenThreads.
"However, if any of Your contributions are included into the Software, they will become part of the Software and will be distributed under the terms and conditions of this License. Further, if Your donated Contributions are integrated into the Software then Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. shall become the copyright owner of the Software now containing Your contributions and SCEA would be the Licensor." Maybe you can't say someone (Robert, Don, Sean depending on the project?) becomes the copyright owner but the contributor forfeits copyright rights to the code that gets included. If it is of interest, the full scea shared source license can be found at http://research.scea.com/scea_shared_source_license.html -Andy E. Wing wrote: >> > By the way, if you relicense OpenThreads, I think you need to make >> > sure every single contributor that has changes in the current code >> > base agrees to the license change or their changes must be pulled from >> > the source base. (I remember PhysFS went through this and it was quite >> > an ordeal for such a small user base.) >> >> You need to check with all the copyright owners, not all the >> contributors. If you don't add a specific note that you are a >> copyright owner of a particular piece of code then you can't assert >> rights over it. I didn't spot any copyright notices others than that >> of the "Open Threads Group", which is under Sean's control. > > Actually, I don't think that's true, at least in the United States. > I'm not a lawyer, but I recently sat in on a class dealing with > patents and copyrights for engineers (taught by a lawyer), and I think > the mere act of writing automatically assigns copyright to the author. > An explicit copyright notice or (C) is not required. (This used to be > untrue in the US I believe until we adopted an international treaty or > convention in the late 80s/early 90s?, so I believe this applies to > the UK and elsewhere too.) The author must explicitly surrender their > rights to their work, not the other way around. > > So I think we need to tread carefully here. Particularly, being open > source, we need to (and should) strive for a high standard of > propriety. > > I'm cross-posting hoping somebody with more legal knowledge can chime in. > > Thanks, > Eric > _______________________________________________ > osg-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users > http://www.openscenegraph.org/ > _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
