Re: [opennms-devel] [PATCH] Timezone support in OpenNMS

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:10:23 -0800, "Marc Petit-Huguenin"
<[email protected]> said:
> David Hustace wrote:
> > On Feb 8, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
> >> The code is copyrighted 2008 8x8 Inc. and is released under the GPL
> >> license.  The code was written by Isabelle Dalmasso.
> > 
> > Thanks for the submission... We're working on new contributor  
> > agreements and perhaps a foundation to hold the IP.  Until we get up  
> > to speed on copyright we won't be adding this enhancement.  We'll  
> > contact you when we figure out an agreement that is acceptable to the  
> > community.  DJ Gregor has made some recommendations and has offered to  
> > participate in a team from the OGP to draft an agreement.  We're
> > thinking something like what Open Solaris has adopted.  They have a  
> > way of assigning dual copyright and seems to be one of the best we've  
> > seen.
> 
> Why do you want the copyright been assigned to somebody else than the
> author?

Hi Mark,

Note: IANALJANG (I am not a lawyer, just a nerdy geek; this is not legal
advice, etc.)

It's difficult in a number of areas to manage a project that is
copyright by numerous parties.  One major reason is that under U.S.
copyright law, you generally cannot enforce a copyright if you are just
a distributor--generally this right reserved for the owner (or assignee)
of the copyright (see the GNU links below).  Having multiple parties own
copyrights to various parts of a work also makes it difficult to change
licenses (e.g.: GPLv2 -> GPLv3, dual/tri/etc. licensing, etc.; see the
Mozilla link below).

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
http://www.netbeans.org/about/legal/ca.html
http://www.apache.org/licenses/

For reference, below is the current Sun contributor agreement (SCA) that
I am quite fond of.  I like the ideas of joint ownership, forcing the
contribution(s) to be licensed under (at least) an FSF or OSI license,
its straight-forward language, and the fact that it fits on a page
(sometimes I'm amazingly easy to please).  Being built for multiple
jurisdictions (e.g.: it should be enforceable in more places that just
the U.S.) is a nice bonus.

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/sca.pdf

Here's a FAQ on the SCA, going right to the "Benefits of a Contributor
Agreement" section:

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/contributor_agreement.jsp#ca_1

I would love to hear about what you think about contributor agreements
in general, or the SCA in specific, either publicly or privately.


        Take care,
        - djg


PS: For those of you who noticed and are curious why most of the SCA is
focused on supporting the concept of joint ownership, here's why:

http://www.cooley.com/news/inthenews.aspx?ID=000037472420

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