On 10/22/05, Tim Lesher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 10/22/05, Krys Wilken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I wonder what the Linux kernel guys have as actualy wording for their > > document that is like this. Maybe TG can benefit from asking > > about/reading their document. > > The Linux kernel DCO is at > http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2004/2004_05_24_dco.html.
Interesting... that's fairly similar to the one I proposed, but provides the additional provisions for people submitting code from other projects that are suitably licensed. It doesn't mention anything about patents, which seems somewhat surprising since every week or two there's an article about how Linux is going to be threatened by patents. > One thing not mentioned is the idea of copyright assignment. Googling > on those two words should bring up the pro and con arguments, but > overall, I think it's a case of "better safe than sorry", and the > beginning of a project (before significant contributions are made) is > the only good time to decide. The FSF site mentions that they like assigned copyrights for the purposes of enforcing the GPL. I actually think that the MIT license is liberal enough that assignment of copyright isn't really necessary. > For example, wxWidgets went through this retroactively, but it never > got acceptance, and it was eventually abandoned. Do you know why they wanted it? For a license change? > For comparison, OpenOffice uses this copyright assignment agreement: > http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/jca.pdf > > (I've gone round the horn with my company over this in the last few > months, so it's all still fresh in my head. :-) ) I hadn't really gone through this exercise before, but I've read enough to know that, if nothing else, it's good for both the project and the contributors to be on the same page about where the code's coming from and that the contributions will be MIT licensed... Kevin
