2009/12/5 Behdad Esfahbod <beh...@behdad.org>: > On 12/05/2009 08:35 AM, Greg Wilson wrote: >> How diligent are this list's members about getting students to sign >> contributors' agreements for the projects they work on? The students we >> had working on Thunderbird this term were required to do so, as all >> Mozilla contributors are, but some of the less structured projects >> (including the one I run *blush*) don't have any paperwork in place. > > In GNOME we don't require any. Contributors keep their rights.
Can we please kill this meme. CLAs are not about assignment of copyright form one party to another. They are the assignment of rights to sub-licence copyrighted material. Without that right to relicense it is not legal to release software under a FOSS (or any other) licence. As for your other comments I'd be surprised (and concerned) if GNOME did not have a contributor agreement like that found in other major open source projects. Bear in mind most of these foundations share at least some of the same legal counsel, the SFLC. who say: "In general, the most important reason to contribute copyrights to the project is to enable the project to enforce the license. Unifying ownership of the copyrights gives the project indisputable enforcement power that is both simple and clear. If copyright ownership is scattered throughout a developer community spanning many countries and years, enforcement efforts face additional barriers." (note this does not necessarily mean copyright assignment) and "Another reason to unify copyrights is to avoid and prevent later competing copyright claims, such as claims that could be made by employers or developers of proprietary software. A project’s copyright assignment process should include questions and instructions designed to identify code with ownership issues, and the code intake process should include mechanisms for dealing with such issues." See http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html#x1-110002.3 for more. We really should not be making glib statements and sending messages to students that do not communicate this professional advice. It's a risk management issue, not a "do or don't". I repeat again that the decision should be based on the amount of IP in a patch, not about an across the board policy. Ross _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
