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From: | David Sugar |
Subject: | Re: [DotGNU]Ximian shows its stripes at last |
Date: | Tue, 08 Jan 2002 07:44:25 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010914 |
This of course is one of the great dangers when asking people to assign copyright. There has to be trust between the developers and whom copyright is being assigned to that the holder will continue to exercise the expressed and intended wishes of the developers. The FSF certainly meets this goal, as one clearly understands what and how they will exercise the rights they aquire and expects them not to suddenly behave differently one day. The FSF is perhaps the most ironic copyright holder of all, as it fully accepts the burdons of copyright ownership and yet exercises none of the so called privileges to it's own benefit. I would like for and do expect FD to achieve a similar level of confidence and trust in the community.
The GPL does work best when there is clear and reachable copyright holders who can defend the code should legal action be required to protect it. However, any individual copyright holder may still have legal standing to do so. Copyright assignment is also best should the need to change the license occur, such as say, some future court chooses to reject specific clauses and a new license need be drawn up. Without clear consent of all copyright holders there are significent problems.
Copyright assignment is useful because people do occassionally dissapear. I understand the Linux kernel has several thousand potential copyright owners involved. Having some copyright owners unreachable is not in itself a disaster, but as noted above, makes certain things more difficult.
Another issue, which is less often seen, is liability. Copyright assignment could be used as a means to lessen an individuals exposure to legal action, even of the groundless sort that sometimes is used simply to hurass or intimidate. Producing a "work for hire" for others and/or using a corporate entity is an even more effective sheltering.
On the surface, having Ximian ask for copyright assignment is in itself a very legitimate request. However, if the intent is to excersize copyright in a manner entirely different from the expressed intent of the developers at the time of assignment, that would be very deeply disturbing. If true, I would probably use stronger words than that. Of course, if the developers were made reasonably aware of how Ximian might or would actually exercise their assigned rights at the time they made their assignments and this is what they actually do, then I see no ethical problem with it from that perspective although I would not personally consider such a company producing products in that way to be acting as a free software company.
Rhys Weatherley wrote:
Finally, confirmation from Miguel that Ximian is indeed looking to make proprietry versions of Mono sometime in the future: http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/mono-list/2002-January/002510.html An excerpt:Ximian owns the whole copyright to: The Mono C# compiler. The runtime engine. We are copyright co-owners with many contributors on: The class libraries. Ximian might relicense any of the code it owns under differentlicenses(this for example enabled us to develop the Exchange plugin for Evolution, which is a proprietary plugin). We also ask contributors to the Mono C# compiler and the runtimeengineto assign the copyright to Ximian (so far, we have got two copyright assignments: one for the compiler, and one for the runtime engine).i.e. they own the entire source to the two most important components, and want all contributors to those components to assign their code to Ximian, so they can take those contributions private anytime they choose. Cheers, Rhys. _______________________________________________ Developers mailing list address@hidden http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers
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