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contributor agreementcontributor agreementPosted Sep 17, 2010 3:50 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: contributor agreement by corbet Parent article: Diaspora source released
Actually.... its a co-ownership arrangement between the contributor and the project...and not a straight up assignment of all rights to a single entity. So its a little more complicated a situation than just a straight copyright assignment because now multiple parties have the ability to re-license a particular contribution. Though I think your right in that another corporate entity would avoid contributing manpower to even if there was some marginal benefit to the rights maintained in a co-owership arrangement.
And actually... I would image violation enforcement actually gets much more complicated with co-ownership of a particular contribution because you'd have to check with all co-owners to make sure they haven't potentially licensed the work to the alleged violator. Even the more typical argument for assignment to a benevolent project entity to make enforcement easier doesn't necessarily hold with co-ownership.
-jef
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contributor agreement Posted Sep 17, 2010 17:22 UTC (Fri) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]
All contributor agreements for free software actually grant you co-ownership of your own code. Do they grant the contributor co-ownership of the entire codebase? Of course not.
So the agreement creates a huge disparity between community contributors and one organization that retains 100% of the code ownership, including the right to relicense it and sell proprietary versions of it.
Developers who care about retaining control of their online identity should think twice before signing a legal paper that makes them loose control of their own code.
contributor agreement Posted Sep 17, 2010 18:05 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
No actually.. they typically don't typically use co-ownership mechanisms. Typically when assignment is required one entity is given full copyright ownership and the contributor is given a broad _license_ to continue to make use of the work and in some cases sub-license it (but not always). Ownership is very specifically bound up with who has standing to enforce breaches of copyright licensing terms. Typically in FOSS copyright assignment situations, the goal is to transfer that ownership to a single central authority.
For example, the FSF's assignment requirement for contribution to GNU codebases is not co-ownership. Its a full transfer with a broad license back and some additional language putting limits on what the FSF can do in terms of re-licensing your contribution. One you assign copyright ownership over to the FSF for a contribution for GNU, you no longer have standing to bring a lawsuit for violation of the licensing terms for that contribution if anyone violates the copyright license. Only the owner can do that, which in this case is the FSF. If you make use of that code in another project, you are only acting as a licensee of that code..not the owner.
I'm actually not aware of another project at the moment which uses a co-ownership mechanism in its contributor agreement.
-jef
contributor agreement Posted Sep 23, 2010 7:50 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
That's jurisdiction-dependant, offcourse. For example many European countries have non-transferable "ideal rights" connected to copyright. And since these are not (even in principle) transferable, you can't possible sign away this fraction of your rights.
contributor agreement Posted Sep 23, 2010 8:27 UTC (Thu) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link] I think the right term is moral rights and, yes, these are generally inalienable.
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