Re: OScheduler

I didn't mean to open up such a can of worms ;-) but...

[let me preface this with: IANAL, and I have little idea what I'm 
talking about]

A "licence" and "copyright ownership" are two very different things.

A license is simply permission to use something owned by someone else 
(or some entity) - and the terms under which this permission is 
granted.  It does not give over any ownership.  This is why software 
companies (among other industries) like licenses.

Owning the copyright to something give you the right to license a copy 
of that something to other people.  If you don't own it, you can't give 
permission for it to be copied or used.

Once again, I don't mean to send off any panic alarms - when I 
originally brought this topic up, I was mostly curious about whether 
"OpenSymphony" had any legal status, such as the Apache Foundation, Free 
Software Foundation, JBoss Group, etc. etc..  The reason (or at least 
one of the major reasons) these foundations exists, is so that there is 
an entity that can claim ownership of the copyright.

I've heard a few stories lately where certain open source projects have 
tried to switch from one license to another (say from LGPL to Apache) 
and they haven't had the legal standing to do so, because no single 
entity owned the code.  Those who now were the developers of the project 
could not redistribute any existing code under another license, unless 
they rounded up every contributor that there ever had been to the 
project over the years, and got written permission from them to do so -- 
because the author had the most immediate claim to ownership, and 
therefore was the only one who could grant a license.


So.... Really, I really don't care much about this legal hog-wash:  I'm 
with Patrick when he says "I'm generally of the mind that anything I 
write for OS is pretty much 'free for all'".  -- That's why I prefer 
Apache/BSD style licenses over GPL style licenses.

But it does potentially put us in some interesting situations down the 
road...

james






Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote:

>Well, it's already under an Apache/BSD style license at the moment?
>
>Cheers,
>Mike
>
>On 14/1/04 10:27 AM, "Joseph Ottinger" ([email protected]) penned the
>words:
>
>  
>
>>On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>James,
>>>
>>>I have to say that's a damn good question - the answer is, I'm not sure. We
>>>just kinda put it all there when we started so that no individual would own
>>>the copyright to the code.
>>>
>>>How do the other core devs feel?
>>>      
>>>
>>My opinion was that OS code should be under the artistic license, which is
>>pretty free-for-all, and while I have very little extant code in
>>opensymphony (transformtags, formtags, some in oscore, some in sitemesh) I
>>still feel that an artistic/bsd license approach is best.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Mike
>>>
>>>On 14/1/04 8:46 AM, "James House" ([email protected]) penned the words:
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Here's another quick question:
>>>>
>>>>Who "owns" the copyright to OpenSymphony code?   All of your source
>>>>files say something like "Copyright (c) 2002-2003 by OpenSymphony".
>>>>
>>>>I guess my question is:  Who/What is OpenSymphony?  Is there a formally
>>>>registered entity (such as a non-profit organization)?  Or is there
>>>>simply the listing of team members on the
>>>>"http://www.opensymphony.com/team.jsp" page - and copyright of all code
>>>>is assumed evenly owned by all of these people?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>regards,
>>>>james
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>Joseph B. Ottinger                             http://enigmastation.com
>>IT Consultant                                    [email protected]
>>Editor-in-Chief - Java Developer's Journal   [email protected]
>>
>>
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>>    
>>
>
>
>
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>Perforce is the Fast Software Configuration Management System offering
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>  
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