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Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 11:12:46 -0500

On  6-Jan-2011, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| tor, 06 01 2011 kl. 10:53 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
| > On  6-Jan-2011, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
| > 
| > | I also think that having a written copyright assignment as a
| > | precondition to any significant changes could lose you some potential
| > | contributors. And it's not just because of the copyright itself, but
| > | because programmers are lazy folk :)
| > 
| > It seems not to hurt Emacs or GCC, so what is different about Octave
| > (or the people who contribute to it)?
| 
| On the other hand it seemed to hurt OpenOffice.org quite a bit (it was
| one of many complaints that ended with the LibreOffice fork).

I don't know the issues involved there, but was it more about the
identity of the copyright holder (lack of trust in them?)?  Or that
there were specific terms in the assignments that were not acceptable?
Or was it really about peeople not wanting to sign the assignment
forms?

| Personally, I wouldn't find signing over copyright, but it would be time
| consuming (finding a fax is practically impossible in Denmark, and going
| to the post office to send a signed document to the US would require an
| hours work), so I'd rather not (as Jaroslav said: people are lazy).

It is possible to make an assignment for a single change, but I think
it is more typical to assign all future changes, so the work only
needs to be done once.

Would you be less hesitant if the process were simplified and less
time consuming?

| Also, what about deceased contributors?

There's not much we can do about that.  IF (and I'm not currently
pushing too hard for it) we were to start requiring assignments, then
I would like to get assignments from past contributors, but I would
not expect that we find everyone.  It would be more important to have
assignments from current contributors.

jwe


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