Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: That said, the discussion started because of Clutter and its copyright assignment and the fact that that is blocking it's inclusion in GNOME 2.28. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm very ready for someone to just tell me that I'm wrong, but: Clutter's isn't a copyright assignment. It's a copyright waiver, placing the code in the public domain: http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/waiver.html My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. I hope that issue can be addressed. Whether I want to assign copyright is a different matter for me. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
(Sent via my phone; apologies for the formatting) To clarify: Clutter (currently) comes with a copyright assignment. The copyright waiver has been introduced for small patches attached to Bugzilla to avoid going through the copyright assignment process. The waiver and the assignment are two orthogonal approaches, and they should not be confused. I explained this in various venues - including at GCDS. We, in Intel, are currently working towards a solution but it will take some time (as usual, when lawyers are involved). Ciao, Emmanuele. On 17 Dec 2009 09:54, Murray Cumming murr...@murrayc.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:08 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: That said, the discussion started because ... I'm not a lawyer, so I'm very ready for someone to just tell me that I'm wrong, but: Clutter's isn't a copyright assignment. It's a copyright waiver, placing the code in the public domain: http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/waiver.html My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. I hope that issue can be addressed. Whether I want to assign copyright is a different matter for me. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-l...@gnome ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
Hi Murray, On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 10:54 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: My concern is that code without a copyright holder cannot really be under any license. This is a very frequently made point; of course - IANAL. But if you follow this argument to it's logical conclusion this makes all of Xorg, gtk+, GNOME, Linux, Mozilla, Busybox, indefensible. If this were true: any form of license would be pretty pointless without aggregate ownership - right ? For instance, nobody could go to court to defend abuse of LGPL code in Clutter: http://git.clutter-project.org/cgit.cgi?url=clutter/tree/COPYING if nobody owns the copyright in that code. Sure, but of course - someone wrote the code once, and thus owns the copyright on at least some piece of it. Busybox's lack of assignment (it appears) hasn't appeared to stop the SFLC chasing GPL violators, sometimes a dozen at a time ;-) http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/ HTH, Michael. -- michael.me...@novell.com , Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org wrote: 2009/12/14 Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org: Had a great GNOME Advisory Board meeting about events and copyright assignments. The copyright assignment discussion in particular was very dynamic. Care to expand on that one? :) The result of the discussion should show up from the board soon. That said, the discussion started because of Clutter and its copyright assignment and the fact that that is blocking it's inclusion in GNOME 2.28. However, since nobody from Intel was on the call, we tried to keep the discussion to copyright assignments in general. We wanted the Board of Advisors input on whether we should have a policy about copyright assignments and what it should be. (As our downstream partners, it's important to have their input.) There were a lot of good points made by both sides. Interestingly enough the sides were not divided by company employees vs community. There were pro and anti copyright assignment folks in both the board of directors and the board of advisors. It was also a very good debate with everyone bringing passion but not anger. (Which I really appreciate right now. :) Some points that came up: * Copyright assignments done by companies are different than those done by a nonprofit. * You can assign copyrights back to the contributor too. * Bradley Kuhn made some of the points he made in his blog post: http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html. * Copyright assignments are a barrier to entry. * Copyright assignments can create paperwork. * Some good projects (that we might want to include in GNOME) have copyright assignments. * Copyright assignments help companies invest more in open source software projects. * There's a need for an industry standard copyright assignment. (Strange and different clauses just increase the problems.) * You can get some of the benefits of copyright assignments (and other benefits) by instead allowing multiple entities to hold copyright like GNOME does. * Copyright assignment policies may cause forking. * Copyright assignments enable easier relicensing. (Which can be both good and bad.) These are not all my points but points that came up during the meeting. Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
* http://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2009/12/14/stormys-update-week-of-december-7th/ http://www.stormyscorner.com/2009/12/stormys-update-week-of-december-7th.html *** Answered a lot of emails and had a lot of discussions. As for things I actually crossed off my todo list: - Updated CiviCRM requirements document with a few more process like the travel committee. Met with Dave Greenberg from CiviCRM. He gave me a lot of pointers on how to get started. I'll be working on getting CiviCRM set up for the GNOME Foundation over the next couple of weeks. - Sent out email about the GNOME Foundation changing advisory board feeshttp://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-December/msg00041.htmlwith the support of the advisory board. - Spoke to the Northern Colorado Linux User Group http://nclug.org/. Gave my Would you do it again for free? talk and had a very interesting and involved discussion. Someone from the first team I ever worked on at HP held up a I heart ObAM sign. ObAM is the user interface programming interface for HPUX tools. It sat on top of Motif when I first joined the team. (I actually had to read the sign twice to see that it said ObAM and not Obama which is a sign of how my world of acronyms and names has changed.) - Did all my expense reports for the last three trips. (I can't believe people griped about the semi-automated HP/Amex system. I personally would love to have it now.) - Attended GNOME Board of Directors meeting. - Worked with Rosanna to invoice a couple of advisory board members, including one that is funding a new program. - Had a meeting with Rosanna over IRC. Trying to help balance out her workload. (I've created a lot more work. Since I've joined we've had a lot more events, invoicing, new programs, more Friends of GNOME, etc.) - Had a great GNOME Advisory Board meeting about events and copyright assignments. The copyright assignment discussion in particular was very dynamic. - Published November Friends of GNOME datahttp://live.gnome.org/action/AttachFile/GnomeMarketing/Tasks/FriendsOfGNOME?action=AttachFile . Focus for this week: - My goals. Finishing a draft we can share so everyone can comment. - CiviCRM. Getting it set up. Starting first with Board of Advisors information and then Friends of GNOME. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stormy's Update: Week of December 7th
2009/12/14 Stormy Peters sto...@gnome.org: Had a great GNOME Advisory Board meeting about events and copyright assignments. The copyright assignment discussion in particular was very dynamic. Care to expand on that one? :) Luis ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
