| |||||||||||||
Project Harmony opens website (The H)Project Harmony opens website (The H)Posted Apr 8, 2011 1:13 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: Project Harmony opens website (The H) by pabs Parent article: Project Harmony opens website (The H) I would distinguish between two cases. The first case is assignment to a nonprofit that's committed to keeping the software free, with a contributor agreement that provides some protections. This has some problems but also some advantages; it certainly makes relicensing easier when it needs to be done. GCC recently made the license on some support files more permissive, since they should have had the "runtime exception" language but this was overlooked. We only had to convince one stubborn person, instead of needing to contact any number of people, some of whom might not even be alive (GCC's been around since the 1980s after all). The second case is assignment to a profit-making company, in exchange for basically nothing, with all rights going to that company. There are certainly situations where I might consider accepting that (e.g. to get a small patch in to code I rely on), but it's not a good deal at all. Maybe there's a third alternative, like authorizing some trusted group to make one's software available under some additional FLOSS license under certain narrow circumstances, to keep projects out of corners where they have to choose which code they can no longer use.
(Log in to post comments)
Project Harmony opens website (The H) Posted Apr 8, 2011 16:37 UTC (Fri) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
The GNU copyright contributions are still harmful. They've caused forks and driven away potential contributors. The kernel has no copyright agreements but it's been more useful in enforcing the GPL. GCC could still be relicensed by using the GPLv2+ license. If you need to change the license entirely, that's maybe trickier, but lots of projects have relicensed by asking individual contributors. Btw, the people who died can't sue you.
So not needed and harmful is probably an accurate description.
Project Harmony opens website (The H) Posted Apr 8, 2011 18:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
slight clarification
the people who died can't sue you, but their heirs can.
Project Harmony opens website (The H) Posted Apr 8, 2011 22:49 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Yes, for anything with commercial value, if anything heirs are more likely to sue, and it's not safe to assume that they won't. Anyone out there who owns copyright in important FLOSS software, please include what you want to happen to that software on your death in your will. We've had a number of important contributor die recently, you aren't immortal.
|
|||||||||||||