On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 15:40 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 16:14 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote: > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 19:18 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 15:13 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote: > > > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 18:04 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > > > > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 11:54 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote: > > > > > > > > > > With some seriously ugly hacks i got it to compile and run, of course > > > > > > still a lot of bugs but when it would be a real community project (no > > > > > > copyright assignments, and no CC-non-commercial license) I think it can > > > > > > be made to work with gcj. > > > > > > > > > > Many community projects including all of the GNU ones require copyright > > > > > assignments. That is on many occasions a good practice. > > > > > > > > And it is also a PITA to do paperwork before you can help with a > > > > project. This about if everybody that helps with Fedora has to sign > > > > legal paperwork, which of course is different in every country. Of > > > > course if you want to sell the GPL work of others under a closed source > > > > license like MySQl, Qt, Open-Xchange, than you need to be the copyright > > > > holder. So the main thing copyright assignment does is turn GPL code > > > > into BSD-like code (be it for a smaller group, the ones the copyrights > > > > are assigned to). A true community project has no need for copyright > > > > assignment. > > > > > > Incorrect. Any project (not just those dual licensed) would be benefit > > > from a better legal stand point by retaining the copyright over all > > > contributions > > > > > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal > > > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html > > > http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt > > > > You can also look at it this way, a country is way easier to control by > > a dictator than by some pesky parliament that always disagree with each > > other. But still most people would rather not have a dictator in their > > country. If people can not agree what to do about a copyright violation > > of a common piece of software, maybe that's how it should be, maybe > > creating a "dictator" by assigning all copyright to "him" is not always > > in the best interest of the community. > > Assigning copyrights doesnt require any dictator (individual) . You can > very well assign copyrights to foundations like Apache or organizations > like FSF Well, then let me emphasize what Alan said before: In Europe, the legal situation is not as clear as you seem to be presuming it. Esp. in Germany and probably other (European) countries, copyrights in general are not assignable at all [1], which means they probably are legally void, a fact which could be legally exploited to fight a license at court. Ralf [1] Germany's constitution explicitly protects copyright on artistic work. The question, which AFAICT has not been decided at courts yet, is if "free, independent and uncontracted work on OSS above a certain amount" qualifies as "free art" and therefore would impose OSS to be protected by Germany's constitution. - So far, at least many legal publications share and emphasize this view. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
