On 10/27/2010 08:39 PM, RA Brown wrote: > On Wed Oct 27 2010 17:05:23 GMT-0700 (PDT) [email protected] > wrote: >> >> Who is now in charge of the code our volunteers contribute? >> Who "owns" the rights to the code that is summited? With only >> Oracle employees in control of the "open source" code, is it truly >> open or just open with what they want to share, even the code that >> was provided by non-Oracle sources. > > Due to agreements with the "community" developers Sun/Oracle has owned > the code from the start. The "owner" of the trademark owns the code. > But with this new attitude with the council being made up of all employees, are they going to share the code? If a volunteer sends in a great piece of code that makes it work better, does Oracle share the code or can they just keep it for their "paid" version, if they continue that line of products as well? If a volunteer developer of code sends in the code to Oracle under the opinion that it will be open source and shared, does Oracle still own the code and can keep it as their own, or does the developer have rights to share that same code to the other forks of OOo? If a developer shares the code with Oracle, then, because it is shared, does the developer still have the rights to the code? He shared it with Oracle under the GPL or other open source sharing options, so Oracle should not say they own the code. They also would not have the rights to keep the code from the open source version of their office package.
That is the issue I would have with coding under the open source system that involves sending it in to a corporation to be included in the software package. Would I have the rights to share it with others? I use to program mainframe and larger systems. In those days, if I wrote a code on my own and presented it to a company for use in the system, I still owned the code, not the company. If I was an employee of the company and developed the code on their time, then they owned the code. But now, with open source options, I truly believe that if you write some code that makes a package better, an open source package, then the person who wrote the code owns the code but issued it under the open source options. I do not feel that the package owners should claim the code as their property. If you are not paid for the code, and offer it freely to an open source project, you should still own your own work under the open source regulations and be able to offer it to other open source systems. I wrote a RPG editor that was better than anything that was used by the college I was going to. Because I wrote it on my time and not theirs, I owned the rights to that RPG editor, not the college. There were a lot of students that thanked me for my effort. Made their life much easier when programming and debugging RPG. Now RPG is no longer used, except in legacy systems, but the issue of rights to the code I wrote is still valid. No one else can own the code I wrote, even if I share it under open source. I own my code, and someone else can use it but not say they own it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
