Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 29, 2009 0:16 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533)
Parent article: Community contributions and copyright assignment

It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org style fork, with the other distributions agreeing on a common base and leaving Ubuntu behind. That would be even simpler than the x.org case so long as Canonical release their changes under the GPL since it would still be possible to include them in the fork as well as changes from other sources.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 29, 2009 2:57 UTC (Thu) by mchehab (subscriber, #41156) [Link] (1 responses)

> It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org
> style fork

I suspect that the terms of the "contributors agreement" will work, in practice, as a non-GPL license, provided that all contributors to upstart sign it.

For example, imagining that a forked version is created, while the original upstart keeps under GPL, it will be possible for the forked versions to get patches from the official upstart version.

However, as Canonical developers are bound to the agreement, they cannot get the patches from the forked version back to their version without violating the agreement, since they cannot transfer the copyrights from someone else to Canonical, nor give the additional rights that the "contributor agreement" requests.

So, a GPL patch from someone that doesn't sign the agreement is incompatible with their license.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:46 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

I think that is what user ewan suggested and I entirely agree with it. Other distributions should make a fork that Canonical cannot make use of. If the patches contributed to this fork are significant enough, it might end up convincing Canonical to drop the copyright assignment.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:39 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link] (2 responses)

That's not as optimal as you might think. For one thing, we'd rather James kept working on it, whereas with X.org there was a bit more of a line in the sand.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Nov 6, 2009 0:17 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

And the guy who started x.org was the guy who'd actually done 90% of the work on XFree - he just got fed up with leadership being all mouth and no trousers. The change of licence was the last straw.

Cheers,
Wol

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Nov 6, 2009 13:37 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

A lot of people worked on XFree. It's true that Keith did an awful lot,
but so did a lot of other people.

(He *had* been around in the X world forever, though, since 1989 I think.
Of course Jim Gettys had been around longer but Jim's been around longer
than *anyone*, pretty much.)

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Posted Oct 31, 2009 9:21 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

That hardly seems optimal to me. I'd _much_ rather see a revised copyright assignment policy from Canonical, and I don't think that is out of the question.