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Copyright resolution
- From: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>
- To: eCos Maintainers <ecos-maintainers at sources dot redhat dot com>
- Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 04:25:38 +0000
- Subject: Copyright resolution
The time has come to bring this to a conclusion. The beta is now out, and
we want this to be resolved for 2.0 final.
I gave Red Hat repeated reminders and finally a deadline of last week to
give a response to the mail I had sent (which you've all seen). But there
was no answer.
At FOSDEM I talked to Martin Michlmayer about SPI and copyright
assignments and stuff, and from that I found out that despite my very
explicit statements in almost all my mails, it is almost certain they
unfortunately didn't quite understand our proposal with licensing
opt-outs. Martin's view from knowing the individuals on the SPI board (he
doesn't speak for SPI so this *isn't* a definitive SPI response though) is
that many of them would be deeply against such license opt-outs.
Add to that that SPI are only now even _considering_ how to deal with
copyright assignments (although admittedly we were only proposing before
them delegating the paperwork to us), and that their approach in general,
while well-intentioned, is unfortunately.... er... amateurish, I don't
believe any chance of license deals between Red Hat and SPI is plausible.
So as I see it, and from what y'all have already indicated preferences
for, there are essentially two conclusions:
a) Create our own "eCos Foundation" whether not-for-profit or otherwise,
and possibly then try to do a deal with Red Hat.;
or
b) Drop the copyright assignment requirement for patches entirely.
There are many advantages to a). Reducing the number of copyright holders
to at most two means licence enforcement becomes easier, along with the
possibility of deals resulting in potential improvements for the eCos
community. Maintaining copyright assignments (and corporate disclaimers)
also adds legal security against risks to the integrity of the IP,
primarily whether someone was actually entitled to give us the code.
Against a) is the burden of doing copyright assignments, and that setting
up and running such a foundation has adminstrative and bureaucratic
overheads. But also key new factors to consider are that Red Hat have been
unfortunately unresponsive at this stage, so how could we ever manage to
do deals with potential "customers" in future, where negotiation time is
limited if this would be standard practice? Also, from FOSDEM, although
the audience wasn't very representative of wider industry, being
intrinsically more free software oriented, no-one would foresee a great
demand for the license opt-outs anyway - people seemed happy with the
GPL+exception.
For b) is losing the burden of assignments, and the stalls for submissions
it causes etc. Against b) is the risk of loss of IP integrity, increased
difficulty of enforcement, and that this step is *irrevocable*. Once we go
down this route we're stuck with the decision forever. And that includes
keeping the existing GPL+exception forever, even if it is found down the
road to be legally flawed.
It seems to me that the idea of license opt-outs etc. is dead, one way or
the other. The only issue really to consider is the integrity of the IP,
defending against potential lawsuits, patents (EU software patents are
unfortunately probably round the corner :-( ), and enforcing the eCos
licence among users. Some people hold up the Linux kernel as an example of
how it can work; others hold up the Linux kernel as an accident waiting to
happen, and with many grey areas just begging to be tried out in court
such as whether the GPL affects modules, and Linus's unilateral change of
the licence.
One great consideration the maintainers have to reflect on is that *we*
can easily divest ourselves of troublesome patches if they turned out to
have legal problems. However we have a responsibility to eCos users, and
many of them may have used such patches in their products, and recalling a
million MP3 players or something or pay royalties/face a lawsuit is not
something we would ever want for users.
One of the big concerns I had was that it is standard operating practice
for software companies to insist that they own everything their employees
write. This would mean that the person contributing the code is _not_ the
entity who owns it; which means that entity can later turn round and say
"that's mine - remove it or face lawsuit, and if you've used it in
products pay us royalties". This type of clause in employment contracts is
so common it can't be ignored.
A compromise suggested in the maintainers meeting in Belgium was a sort of
half way house... all contributors could electronically submit a form that
explicitly says that they owned the code and they have checked their
employment contract and their employer doesn't own it. If their employer
does own their code, then they must send us (via some PO box we set up)
the company disclaimer from http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/assign.html. So
not the assignment itself, but the disclaimer that usually goes with it.
This may well hit many people, but gives us a degree of legal safety.
After all, if the contributor doesn't own the code, it would definitely be
wrong to accept it.
Personally I don't think I could even _consider_ accepting option b)
unless we added this policy (the corollary being that we would be prepared
to accept code that inevitably sometimes must be owned by employers, not
contributors). However, if such clauses in employment contracts are as
pervasive as I think they may well be, one could easily argue that we may
as well just keep the assignments.
So we need to get a conclusion. I've made a few assumptions above, but if
anyone disagrees please do say. Similarly, if people think we should be
considering other options, say so too.
I would like to hear from every maintainer in this thread. Unless we get
complete consensus, I would suggest thrashing things out here a little,
and then setting up a phone conference to reach the conclusion.
I won't say what my favoured personal preference is until tomorrow as I
want to prevent this post appearing biased :-P.
What I would say is that if Red Hat presented the option of assigning all
their copyright to a _single_ not-for-profit entity on a plate, I'd go for
that. But that's safe to say since it isn't an option :-) :-(.
Jifl
--
eCosCentric http://www.eCosCentric.com/ The eCos and RedBoot experts
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