Disclaimer: IANAL TINLA, however I did work with the lawyers at the
Software Freedom Law Center when setting up Drupal's copyright policies
and procedures and currently serve on the Licensing Working Group. So
feel free to take with some salt, but not too much salt. :-)
It's not that FIG needs to own the code per se; strictly speaking there
is no legal entity called FIG, so it cannot own copyright on anything.
However, bear in mind that under copyright law you own any non-trivial
work you produce immediately upon doing so, and no one else has any
legal right to copy it, much less use it, without your explicit consent
(modulo fair use).
So work done on what will become code for a PSR is by default copyright
its original owners and no one else is allowed to use it without their
consent.
FIG has a standing policy that all code "we" produce is MIT licensed,
and any prose/documentation is CC-BY 3.0:
http://www.php-fig.org/bylaws/licensing-policies/
Therefore, it's a much more defensible position to say that anyone
working on a FIG-umbrella spec is explicitly releasing their work under
MIT than in a random GitHub repository with no such published
statement. The alternative is to have to go through the rigmarole as
seen in the last several comments of this thread:
https://github.com/php-fig/container/pull/4#issuecomment-242247526
(Basically, under the FIG umbrella those statements become implicit in
participation and PRs in the first place.)
To be fair, the odds of this becoming a problem in practice are small.
However, I'd much rather err on the side of crossing our T's and dotting
our I's where copyright law is concerned, just to be safe and minimize
the chances of something becoming an issue in the future.
The more aggressive, defensible position would be for FIG to be a legal
entity and have a Contributor License Agreement, but I'm fairly sure the
latter is much farther than we want to go.
(This is your regular reminder that if you find a random GitHub repo
that you want to use, but it has no license specified, *it is a felony
for you to use it without the prior written consent of the author*. I
never said copyright law was good, but it is what it is. Please license
your code.)
--Larry Garfield
On 08/23/2016 08:24 AM, Keith Casey wrote:
Why does FIG need to own it in this regard?
On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 11:25:20 PM UTC-5, Michael Cullum wrote:
Hi all,
It's worth noting here an issue we just came across with
container-interop, essentially the problem exists in the licensing
in that we essentially need specs to be licensed to the FIG from
the beginning otherwise we hit issues with copyright reassignment
(we [secretaries] are currently working with the PSR-11 team
behind the scenes to get this resolved).
https://github.com/php-fig/container/pull/4
<https://github.com/php-fig/container/pull/4>
--
Michael C
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