Re: [tdf-discuss] [FAQ] new entries (here: CA/JCA/SCA)
Hi Andrea, Firstly - sorry for a long delay before replying; believe it or not, in all the work of going live I forgot to subscribe to discuss, and so never saw your mail. Anyhow - after digging it out of the archive, let me set that right; you make some good points. On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 13:57 +0200, Andrea Pescetti wrote: On 02/10/2010 Dr. Bernhard Dippold wrote: Q: What are copyright agreements (CA/JCA/SCA) with Oracle and why are they counterproductive to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and FOSS? So - in my view they are profoundly counter-productive, although they can have some benefits; I wrote a huge screed on the subject here: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/copyright-assignment.html 1) Oracle will never be able to sue LibreOffice for patent violations, and this is true thanks to a copyright agreement. OOo 1.x-2.x was distributed under LGPL 2.1 and Sun could update the licence to LGPL 3, when OOo 3.x was released, only because of the copyright agreements in place. So - this is true; but -horribly- misleading IMHO. Yes it is certainly the case that re-licensing was only possible because they owned the rights: but then, if they had not owned the rights - they would necessarily have used a plus-license - which also allows re-licensing to future versions. So - I think this argument is extremely circular. True - in choosing the LGPLv3 they took advantage of the grandfathering clause, and simultaneously gave us an excellent explicit patent grant. IMHO an implicit grant is present in the LGPLv2 too - but - lets not split hairs here ;-) 2) Copyright Agreements/Assignments are commonplace in Free Software. Again - they are not that common-place. The vast majority of free-software projects I've worked with, and arguably the ones with the most dynamic communities - do not have these agreements in place. The Mozilla Foundation, if I recall correctly, does not require an explicit copyright assignment, You do recall correctly; They have a contributor agreement - but it is mostly useless, since it applies only to those committing the code, not the original copyright owners :-) but reserves the right to change the license at any time (MPL, Article 11). Right ! Of course both Oracle and IBM are clearly happy with the MPL, despite the originators having eclectic ownership - since they currently ship a -huge- chunk of this code inside OpenOffice.org in the form of Mozilla. This is one of the reasons that we ask people to use an LGPLv3+/MPL dual-license for their code contributions. Clearly if this situation was acceptable for OpenOffice.org, demanding something different of LibreOffice appears to have little legal basis. The main flaw with the (improving over time) Sun/Oracle Copyright Agreements/Assignments was that the entity in control was a company, not a democratic, independent, trustworthy foundation. Completely agreed. I have some sympathy for the FSF's assignment; but I still believe it substantially retards contribution, and is ulimately un-necessary. I believe that the Document Foundation, once formally established, will totally deserve my trust, and I think I won't have any regrets in sharing with the Document Foundation the copyright over my contributions, and this will also make the Document Foundation stronger. Well - I'm encouraged that you place that much trust in TDF :-) personally, I have no problem with you assigning your rights to TDF, or even the FSF [ this used to happen in the past voluntarily for GNOME - although almost no-one took up this option ]. B - Rewrite the answer (I use Jonathon's text as a basis) as: Some great suggestions here. C - Kindly ask the the Document Foundation's stakeholders, when they define the official policy, to avoid presenting Copyright Agreements/Assignments as inherently bad: very respectable Foundations promoting Free Software do use them, in the interest of their projects, and a trustworthy Foundation should not be afraid to ask for them. Again - I believe that aggregating this ownership right in the hands of (even) a well regulated, and governed non-profit is potentially risky. If the argument goes: they will never use it, so why not ? it makes me wonder why ? :-) If the argument is that there is some negotiation with Oracle that this makes possible - then, I have to wonder why Oracle is happy to ship millions of lines of Mozilla code (under the MPL) that they can never own as part of the product. So - in summary; I think this issue can get blown out of proportion. Currently - we have no way of stopping people assigning their copyright to whomever they wish - even Oracle :-) but we do ask for plus licensing, to remove this cannot change the license in future red herring. Anyhow - thanks for starting a great thread; sorry I missed the mail, would love to hear your riposte
Re: [tdf-discuss] [FAQ] new entries (here: CA/JCA/SCA)
On 02/10/2010 Dr. Bernhard Dippold wrote: Q: What are copyright agreements (CA/JCA/SCA) with Oracle and why are they counterproductive to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and FOSS? Honestly I would be much more pragmatic here. Since we are on a catch-all mailing list it's better that I first state a few plain facts involving Copyright Agreements/Assignments and OOo or Free Software. 1) Oracle will never be able to sue LibreOffice for patent violations, and this is true thanks to a copyright agreement. OOo 1.x-2.x was distributed under LGPL 2.1 and Sun could update the licence to LGPL 3, when OOo 3.x was released, only because of the copyright agreements in place. The request came from the community (I remember Charles calling for it), but the actual change was only possible due to copyright agreements otherwise it would have been impossible to reach out to all contributors, including dead ones. LGPL 3 (through article 11 of the included GPL 3) protects LibreOffice from patent claims. 2) Copyright Agreements/Assignments are commonplace in Free Software. The Free Software Foundation itself required me (like all contributors to FSF projects) to assign them the copyright of any contributions, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html . The Mozilla Foundation, if I recall correctly, does not require an explicit copyright assignment, but reserves the right to change the license at any time (MPL, Article 11). Does this mean that contributions to FSF projects or Mozilla Foundation products can be included in proprietary software at any time if the relevant Foundation wants so? Yes. Will they ever do that? Here is the real point. The main flaw with the (improving over time) Sun/Oracle Copyright Agreements/Assignments was that the entity in control was a company, not a democratic, independent, trustworthy foundation. I believe that the Document Foundation, once formally established, will totally deserve my trust, and I think I won't have any regrets in sharing with the Document Foundation the copyright over my contributions, and this will also make the Document Foundation stronger. So I would: A - Remove the /LibreOffice and FOSS from the question. B - Rewrite the answer (I use Jonathon's text as a basis) as: Contributors to the OpenOffice.org project have had to sign a contract that assigns (joint) ownership of their contributions to Sun, and subsequently Oracle. This enabled Sun/Oracle to include that contribution in a proprietary product, thus giving to one company too much control over the OpenOffice.org project. C - Kindly ask the the Document Foundation's stakeholders, when they define the official policy, to avoid presenting Copyright Agreements/Assignments as inherently bad: very respectable Foundations promoting Free Software do use them, in the interest of their projects, and a trustworthy Foundation should not be afraid to ask for them. Best regards, Andrea Pescetti. -- To unsubscribe, send an empty e-mail to discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted. List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
Re: [tdf-discuss] [FAQ] new entries (here: CA/JCA/SCA)
Hi all, I'm Croatian translation coordinator for OOo, and I support The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. I have question on this topic. Is there any possibility that Oracle *can* sue OpenOffice.org contributor who signed a contract about sharing the contributor's copyright only because contributor decide to contribute to LibO with same content, too? For example, I signed contract with Sun Microsystems. Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems. I contribute Croatian translation to OOo. Same content + new translation I contribute to LibO. Can I be sued? Best, Robetr Sedak On 2.10.2010 21:01, Dr. Bernhard Dippold wrote: Hi all, just starting to collect additional FAQ entries to be added to http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ Please provide questions and answers you think to be important, improve my wordings and content, if I'm not clear enough or simply wrong. -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Q: What are copyright agreements (CA/JCA/SCA) with Oracle and why are they counterproductive to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and FOSS? A: Every contributor to OpenOffice.org code has to sign a contract about sharing the contribution's copyright with Oracle. As this agreement can't be retracted it covers all future contributions too. This allows Oracle to behave as the copyright owner, claiming copyright infringement and other legal rights. On the other hand this agreement allows them to release the contribution under any license they want to, including proprietary ones, without the contributor having any right to refuse it. -+-+-+-+-+--+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Best regards Bernhard -- To unsubscribe, send an empty e-mail to discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted. List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
