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FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the K Desktop Environment project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. "We see the adoption of the FLA by KDE as a positive and important milestone in the maturity of the Free Software community," says Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "The FLA was designed to help projects increase the legal maintainability of their software to ensure long-term protection and reliability. KDE is among the most important Free Software initiatives and it is playing a central role in bringing freedom to the desktop. This decision of the KDE project underlines its dedication to think about how to make that freedom last." Adriaan de Groot, Vice President of KDE e.V., the organisation behind the KDE project, said "KDE e.V. has endorsed the use of a particular FLA based directly on the FSFE's sample FLA as the preferred way to assign copyright to the association. We recognise that assignment is an option that individuals may wish to exercise; it is in no way pushed upon KDE contributors. There are also other avenues of copyright assignment available besides the FLA, but we believe this is the easiest way to get it done, with little fuss. Enthusiasm for the FLA was immediate -- people were asking for printed versions of the form before the week was out so that they could fill one in." "The FLA is a versatile document designed to work across different countries with different perceptions of copyright and authorship," says Shane Coughlan, Freedom Task Force coordinator. "As a truly international project, KDE provides a great example of how the FLA can provide legal coherency in the mid-to-long term. It's been a pleasure to help with the adoption process and FSFE's Freedom Task Force is ready to continuing supporting KDE in the future." KDE's adoption of the FLA is the result of cooperation between KDE e.V. and FSFE's Freedom Task Force over the last year and a half, part of the deepening collaboration between the two associate organisations. About the FLA: The FLA was written by Dr. Axel Metzger (Ifross) and Georg Greve (FSFE) in consultation with renowned international legal and technical experts. Parties involved in the evolution of the FLA at some point or another included RA Dr. Till Jaeger, Carsten Schulz, Prof. Eben Moglen, RA Thorsten Feldmann, LL.M., Werner Koch, Alessandro Rubini, Reinhard Muller and others. The latest revision was compiled by Georg Greve and FSFE's FTF coordinator Shane M Coughlan based on feedback provided by Dr. Lucie Guibault of the Institute for Information Law in the Netherlands. About KDE: KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. About the Free Software Foundation Europe: The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a non-profit non-governmental organisation active in many European countries and involved in many global activities. Access to software determines participation in a digital society. To secure equal participation in the information age, as well as freedom of competition, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) pursues and is dedicated to the furthering of Free Software, defined by the freedoms to use, study, modify and copy.Founded in 2001, creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people Freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSFE. The Freedom Task Force can be found at http://www.fsfeurope.org/ftf/ The Freedom Task Force can be emailed at ftf at fsfeurope.org Contact: You can reach the FSFE switchboard from: Belgium: +32 2 747 03 57 Germany: +49 700 373 38 76 73 Sweden: +46 31 7802160 Switzerland: +41 43 500 03 66 UK: +44 29 200 08 17 7 Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, FSFE extension: 408 Further information: http://fsfeurope.org _______________________________________________ Press-release mailing list Press-release@fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release (Log in to post comments)
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 22, 2008 19:49 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] the ability to re-license is a valid reason (one that I happen to disagree with, but valid nontheless) but I would have thought that the busybox lawsuits would have put to rest the fiction that unless the copyrights are assigned to the project there is legal questions on the ability to sue for infringement.
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 22, 2008 22:47 UTC (Fri) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link]
> but I would have thought that the busybox lawsuits would have put to rest
> the fiction that unless the copyrights are assigned to the project there > is legal questions on the ability to sue for infringement.
There are not legal questions on the ability to sue for infringement.
Notice that the BusyBox lawsuits were filed on behalf of the developers of
The reasoning here is if a developer wants to avoid copyright infringement
But there are definitely issues for large projects where developers
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 23, 2008 14:10 UTC (Sat) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]
Any copyright holder can do a one time delegation to a lawyer to sue for infringement. You still have to sign a few papers because it's done in your name, but that's it. This is how the SFLC is enforcing busybox (every new suit requires a new authority from the copyright holders).
So the idea that the authority has to be delegated in perpetuity, like the FLA does is incorrect.
On the other hand, project contributors do die or move on to other things (and change email address). If the infringement of a distributed ownership work is only a small amount of code, you have to be able to find the owners of exactly that code in order to begin a lawsuit.
The main problem with the FLA for the kernel for example is that we'd have to find all the authors to begin using it. However, perhaps there's the case for a better and weaker instrument. Something that permitted X to sue on behalf of developers but didn't do the exclusive assignment rights (the latter are what require all authors). To be effective it would really only need authors covering reasonable areas which will be much easier to put together and provide the same level of infringement protection as the FLA.
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 23, 2008 20:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, the full text of the announcement says that developers are not required to sign over their copyrights, but this is in place for those who want to.
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 24, 2008 13:10 UTC (Sun) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]
Other Options?
I wonder whether it would be possible to give the ability to enforce outside of the ability to relicense.
Could one not make an agreement to give the right to enforce the license, collect for non-enforcement and share any damages?
Also, with the ability to relicense, wouldn't there be a way to constrain this ability to certain parameters so that some wild change would not be possible, but sensible ones in keeping with the original intent of the coders would be possible?
all the best,
drew
FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) Posted Aug 24, 2008 13:44 UTC (Sun) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
> it would be possible to give the ability to enforce outside of the ability to relicense
This agreement allows KDE e.V. to take on essentially any action that the original copyright holder
> the right to enforce the license, collect for non-enforcement and share any damages?
That's already allowed by this instrument, and one of the reasons (we hope never to have to
> wouldn't there be a way to constrain this ability
Absolutely. When you sign an FLA with KDE e.V., there's another document called the FRA (which
It is a separate document so as to keep it between the signatories only and out of the FLA itself
IANAL, Aaron Seigo.
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