Brett Glass wrote: > At 04:26 AM 2/14/2002, Roger Fujii wrote: > >This scheme would make the license awkward, because you have to add in > >"oh, by the way, all the contributions you make will be given to winecorp > >with an unrestricted license" clause. It is far cleaner and simpler to > >require contributions to assign the copyright. OpenOffice does this. > > The danger of this approach is that EVERYONE -- even contributors -- must > go to the organization that owns the copyright and ask, "Mother, may I?" > before doing things with the code.
well, I think the assumption here was that winecorp would always release an lgped (or whatever viral license) version of the tree, so that 'normal' use would not be inhibited. I suppose there is a small window between submission/transfer of copyright and the publication into the tree where the maintainer/licensor may go insane and to something silly, but that scenario would definitely fall under "done in bad faith". > Commercial entities will have no guarantee that they'll be allowed to > use even their own contributions -- especially if their competitors are > part of the body that grants permissions. Politics can also rear their > head, with favoritism toward specific vendors. you do have a point - given that this licensing issue started up again because of what appears to be competitive/political reasons, I guess one shouldn't ignore the possible influence it might have in the future. -r
