Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership
Mark Shuttleworth's push for copyright assignment agreements takes an
interesting turn with this lengthy post
suggesting that contributors owe a project their copyrights since they are
dumping a maintenance load on that project. "So, one of the reasons
I'm happy to donate (fully and irreversibly) a patch to a maintainer, and
why Canonical generally does assign patches to upstreams who ask for it, is
that I think the rights and responsibilities of ownership should be
matched. If I want someone else to handle the work - the responsibility -
of maintenance, then I'm quite happy for them to carry the rights as
well. That only seems balanced. In the common case, that maintenance turns
out to be as much work as the original crafting of the patch, and frankly,
it's the 'boring work' part, while the fun part was solving the problem
immediately at hand.
"