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

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DJ Gregor wrote:
> 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/

So basically there is two reasons for copyright assignment:  To enforce
the copyright and to be able to change the license.  I have no problem
with the former, even if I am not sure if it makes things really more
efficient.  The most successful (or visible?) copyright enforcement is
done by a copyright owner of part of the code of the Linux kernel (see
gpl-violations.org), which does not have copyright assignment.

Now permit to change the license is a different matter.  We (8x8) are a
service company (we sell subscriptions to VoIP services).  For a service
company, the GPL is a good license (an even better license would be GNU
Affero GPL), because everybody have to redistribute with the same terms.
 But I would disagree to have our code released under other licenses.  I
would certainly assign a copyright to the FSF, because we all know the
principles RMS stands for, but I will never assign a copyright to Sun.
Companies, even mostly benevolent, can change or be bought by evil
companies.

BTW, copyright assignment or not, there is no difficulties to change the
license from GPLv2 to GPLv3, because the current license says "either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

And IANAL.

- --
Marc Petit-Huguenin           [                                 ]
Home: [email protected] [RFC1855-compliant space for rent ]
Work: [email protected]            [                                 ]
[                                                               ]
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