groupware for Fedora

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 15:40 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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
Well, then let me emphasize what Alan said before: In Europe, the legal
situation is not as clear as you seem to be presuming it.

Esp. in Germany and probably other (European) countries, copyrights in
general are not assignable at all [1], which means they probably are
legally void, a fact which could be legally exploited to fight a license
at court.



Ralf

[1] Germany's constitution explicitly protects copyright on artistic
work. The question, which AFAICT has not been decided at courts yet, is
if "free, independent and uncontracted work on OSS above a certain
amount" qualifies as "free art" and therefore would impose OSS to be
protected by Germany's constitution. - So far, at least many legal
publications share and emphasize this view.