Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Soliciting Feedback: Gentoo Copyright Assignments / Licensing

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:07:59AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Announcing once to -dev-announce due to the general importance of this
> topic to the community, but ALL replies should go to -nfp, or to
> trustees@ if you must, or to /dev/null if you shouldn't.
> 
> Before I start, yes, the trustees realize that there are legal issues
> around copyright assignment in general, and that various workaround
> exist and may or may not work, such as various contributor licensing
> agreements that are used by various organizations, especially in
> Europe.  The purpose of this thread isn't really to debate this topic,
> as it might be moot in any case.

I understand your wish to somehow think that the legal issues involved
have no pertinence to this discussion, but that just isn't the case.  In
fact, they will be one of the major factors that control any decision
that is picked, so you can't just ignore them, sorry.

> The question we would like to get feedback from the Gentoo community
> on is this: is copyright assignment (or something like it) something
> Gentoo should even be pursuing, and if so, to what degree?

My personal opinion is, "No, the Gentoo Foundation should not be
pursuing any copyright assignment for any code that it creates or
manages."  And my main justification for this goes to the above point,
to do anything other than this is almost a legal impossibility for a
project like Gentoo (i.e. one that spans the world and accepts
contributions from people working for a wide range of companies) that
wishes to continue to accept contributions from as many people as
possible.

This was the main reason that Gentoo gave up on the copyright assignment
clause in the developer agreement all those years ago.

Those who forget history, are doomed to repeat it, let's not go through
all of this again, please.

On a personal note, if any copyright assignment was in place, I would
never have been able to become a Gentoo developer, and if it were to be
put into place, I do not think that I would be allowed to continue to be
one.  I'm sure lots of other current developers are in this same
situation, so please keep that in mind when reviewing this process.

thanks,

greg k-h