On 3 August 2017 at 09:47, Luigi Baldoni <[email protected]> wrote: > Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2017 at 12:23 AM > From: "Walter Fey" <[email protected]> >> >> I agreed to this and informed him, that due to serious legal concerns, >> I cannot publish the copyright remark that is pointing to SUSE LINUX GmbH, >> Nuernberg, Germany without a written approval from this company. > > This is the part I understand the least. > What would be the legal ramifications or even just the risks in > attributing copyright to a third party? Or is mentioning a trademark that > concerns you?
I also don't understand this part - especially as most FOSS licenses require a copyright attribution for involved authors and require them to be preserved when redistributing eg: from https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." eg. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html "Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL)." "If you have copied code from other programs covered by the same license, copy their copyright notices too. Put all the copyright notices together, right near the top of each file." In addition to many licenses requiring an explicit copyright notice and the preservation of it, Germany, UK and the US (as the three most relevant legal authorities which OBS operates under) are all signatories to the Berne convention which gives "automatic protection" to copyrightable works under their jurisdiction. This complicates matters with FOSS licenses which consider copyright attribution as 'optional' but require it's preservation when source is being redistributed. An 'implied' copyright assignment might not be enforceable in all countries, and yet openSUSE's OBS can, and does, redistribute software & source in all countries. It's the openSUSE's projects opinion that to ensure the software's free distributability the best approach is to require the explicit declaration of copyright attribution in all specfiles. That copyright attribution should include all of the involved parties who authored that specfile. > Furthermore, you wouldn't even have to use the "Copyright SUSE GmbH" line. > Several other packagers just put in their name, current year and everyone > who adds something to it would add his own. Exactly, and the openSUSE Project is _perfectly_ happy with that. We encourage our contributors to share their copyright attributions when there is more than one party that wants to be recognised as a copyright holder on the work they have contributed to the openSUSE Project. > Also, I understand the principle of wanting one's work to be recognised, > but is it worth the trouble for something that can be trivially reimplemented > and it's MIT licensed so anyone could reuse it in the first place? And as linked above, the MIT license already requires an explicit copyright declaration in order to be MIT licensed. Without a copyright declaration, a file claiming to be MIT licensed is breaching the terms of it's own license, and therefore is not legally redistributable. _______________________________________________ Packman mailing list [email protected] http://lists.links2linux.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/packman
