To: gnu-arch-users@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] GNU copyright assignment
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Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:38:48 -0400
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From: jblack@merconline.com (James Blackwell)
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>    James> Sure, you'll be able to get plenty of people to sign legal
>    James> copyright transfer forms (at least if you pay for the
>    James> shipping).
>
> Many projects have made this transition.  I don't see why Tom won't do
> what such maintainers normally do:
>
> 1. He asks for assignments.  If he doesn't get them,
> 2. He asks for volunteers to reimplement.  If he doesn't get them,
> 3. He asks himself to reimplement.  If he refuses,
> 4. He pulls the code out.
>
> There's an alternative to (2) for contributions that are big enough,
> which is to negotiate an alternative deal.  That presumably would be
> done by the FSF.
>
> I don't understand why you're worrying about this issue.  (Well, I

Mostly because I haven't heard him actually say that this is what he's
going to do. For all he's said, he could be planning to violate
copyright by changing various headers and dumping the license into the
FSF's lap.

When licensing is involved, there are legal ramifications. It doesn't
hurt to have the obvious stated.

> guess in step 3 Tom is talking to himself, so that's a little
> worrying.  :-)  Tom rewrote the whole larch deal in C in a period of a
> couple months; he can compute the downside of the assignment policy,

Grin. Yeah. That was a neat hack of his (seriously), to write a script
to convert bash into C. :)

> he's said "it's minor"---so why don't you just take him at his word?
> The code will remain GPL and available to all throughout this process;
> it's not like the FSF will issue an SCO-style "pay-royalties-or-
> destroy-all-copies" demand.

Heh. Of course not. But the issue is certainly deserving of more
conversation of an "oh by the way" hidden on page 23. 

To be honest, I had two purposes to the message: 

  1. To make sure that everyone was aware that there was a couple
  out of context sentences tucked away in the middle of a large document
  that said he was proposing that the license owner be changed. That way
  everyone is aware, and nobody gets a surprise and later sues.
  
  2. To publically state a process so as to avoid the reprocussions of
  #1.


> I have my issues with assignment to the FSF, as you might guess, but
> if Tom wants to do it, it's clearly the right thing to do (though it
> is 99% political and 1% "professionalism" IMO), and it will work out
> fine.

Yeah. I think I'm on the same page you are. 

Out of curiosity, who approves of the copyright assignment to the FSF?
Who doesn't approve? Who doesn't care? 


As for myself, I'm ambivalent. To me, it seems like a moderate amount of
work chasing people down, getting signed copyright assignments,
replacing code, pulling code, etc.

What does arch gain for this? 


-- 
James Blackwell          Try something fun: For the next 24 hours, give
Smile more!              each person you meet a compliment!

GnuPG (ID 06357400) AAE4 8C76 58DA 5902 761D  247A 8A55 DA73 0635 7400


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