Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:57:37 -0700 From: garys@opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: new project, old license Message-ID: <whslwha8ke.lwh@mail.opusnet.com> In-Reply-To: <86u0gx3os7.fsf@xps.des.no> ( =?iso-8859-1?q?Dag-Erling_Sm=F8rgrav's_message_of?= "Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:49:12 %2B0200") References: <Pine.NEB.4.62.0509060924400.21386@pilchuck.reedmedia.net> <86u0gx3os7.fsf@xps.des.no>
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des@des.no (Dag-Erling Smørgrav) writes: > The license normally says "BY THE FOO PROJECT AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS" or > "BY ITS AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS" in which case I'd consider the author > of the derivative work a contributor and leave it at that. IANAL. I'm not commenting on the guts of that, just a side issue it prompted. IMO, writing only "By The Foo Project" is just an ill-advised way of writing "By contributors to the Foo Project", and both are of weak merit in forming legal contracts between the many IP owners and users, when many contributions have no associated evidence of authorship, let alone ownership. But it's worked in the past and so should work in the future (to borrow a phrase from NASA). And it's too late hard and too late to bother changing, so what's a project to do? Nothing. I DO wish that "contributors" or at least "project and contributors", was used more often than "project", which is all I remember seeing in FreeBSD. P.S. Recent patches of the Linux kernel are supposed to have a claim of authorship in the form of a "From:" line in the msg _body_; I expect that it will have many authors like "Joe Blow" instead of "Joe Blow's Employer", the author in law, and they'll eventually try to make it clear they want a claim of ownership instead. P.P.S. I recently had a fight with my conscience when I considered adding a copyright notice to one of my contributions, per the .gov website I had just read. It seemed to me that each significant (?) change should add a notice to the CVS for posterity, to be removed by the next one, probably keeping another one or more in the file with a more generic, though less righteous, notice. The individual notices would not be worth much as notices, but it would tend to encourage contributors to go on record as to who owns their contribution. (I lost my fight and went along to get along. :)
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