Whose project is it anyway?

Posted Jun 7, 2007 15:43 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
Parent article: Whose project is it anyway?

Some points to keep in mind with this dispute include:

The Handhelds.org company registration lists 2005 as the date of organisation. Prior to that, the site claimed to be copyright Compaq.
Both Opie and GPE have mailing list archives that begin before 2005, so Compaq/HP would have been in control of the site when those projects started. Did Compaq/HP own the projects back then?
In January 2005, Matchbox moved from http://matchbox.handhelds.org to http://projects.o-hand.com/matchbox. Other than the move happening before Handhelds.org, Inc took over, how does this differ from the GPE move?

George France has posted an extract from the Articles or Organization for Handhelds.org, but it does leave a few questions unanswered:

Who are the members and trustees of Handhelds.org? If the non-profit is going to be managing the trademarks for these projects, you'd hope that the developers have some say in how it is being managed.
What was actually transferred from Compaq/HP to Handhelds.org? The Handhelds.org news article talks about ownership of the servers being transferred to Handhelds.org. There is no talk of transfer of intellectual property, which isn't too surprising if it was considered to be a hosting site.