On 01/21/2011 09:39 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote: > Is it remotely valid for them to claim copyright without any formal > copyright assignment documents being exchanged? I suppose this depends > on what "submit" means, but it sure sounds as if they claim that you > hand over your copyright just by being friendly and sending a bugfix to > them. Is it remotely valid? Man, I don't know. If I had to wager, I'd say that if you clearly declare your copyright on any contribution and specifically do not disclaim it, it would trump such a "declaration", but who knows what a judge would think. > Does this in any way impact the suitability of this package for Fedora? As distasteful as it is, I don't think so. They do not require that you send them anything, they just say that if you do, you're also giving them copyright. I would much prefer to see them leave this whole copyright assignment concept out of the source licensing. I'm going to run this one past RH Legal just to be sure. > The firmware mentioned is given in the form of hex code, which doesn't > seem to be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to > it." I know the issue of GPL'd binary-only stuff must have come up > before; is there a summary of the issue anywhere I can look at? I'm not sure that it really has come up before. I would wholeheartedly agree with you that firmware hex code is not "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", but I'm also not sure whether the copyright holder (the licensor) or the licensee is the one who determines what is preferred. To put it bluntly, you might have to sue them to get the raw firmware source. As always, IANAL, this is not legal advice. ~tom == Fedora Project _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal
