groupware for Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 16:14 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 19:18 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 15:13 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 18:04 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 11:54 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > > 
> > > > > With some seriously ugly hacks i got it to compile and run, of course
> > > > > still a lot of bugs but when it would be a real community project (no
> > > > > copyright assignments, and no CC-non-commercial license) I think it can
> > > > > be made to work with gcj.
> > > > 
> > > > Many community projects including all of the GNU ones require copyright
> > > > assignments. That is on many occasions a good practice. 
> > > 
> > > And it is also a PITA to do paperwork before you can help with a
> > > project. This about if everybody that helps with Fedora has to sign
> > > legal paperwork, which of course is different in every country. Of
> > > course if you want to sell the GPL work of others under a closed source
> > > license like MySQl, Qt, Open-Xchange, than you need to be the copyright
> > > holder. So the main thing copyright assignment does is turn GPL code
> > > into BSD-like code (be it for a smaller group, the ones the copyrights
> > > are assigned to). A true community project has no need for copyright
> > > assignment.
> > 
> > Incorrect. Any project (not just those dual licensed) would be benefit
> > from a better legal stand point by retaining the copyright over all
> > contributions 
> > 
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal
> > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
> > http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
> 
> You can also look at it this way, a country is way easier to control by
> a dictator than by some pesky parliament that always disagree with each
> other. But still most people would rather not have a dictator in their
> country. If people can not agree what to do about a copyright violation
> of a common piece of software, maybe that's how it should be, maybe
> creating a "dictator" by assigning all copyright to "him" is not always
> in the best interest of the community. 

Assigning copyrights doesnt require any dictator (individual) . You can
very well assign copyrights to foundations like Apache or organizations
like FSF

> 
> Of course the FSF is "always" doing the "right" thing, so assigning
> copyright to them is probably not a problem. But what good is it for the
> community to assign copyright to some company like the one making
> Open-Xchange, MySql, Qt etc. ?  

I was pointing out that there are good benefits out of the scheme.
Whether you choose to assign your copyrights to dual licensing
organizations is more of a question of trust, renumeration etc. 

Rahul