On 21/05/16 06:11, Stefan Peter wrote: > All, > On 20.05.2016 20:22, David Cramblett wrote: >> I think it's more the general idea of this situation is common. My >> employer uses BackupPC as well, and much of my work would be on company >> time - although I work for a government agency. So not necessarily >> singling you out, just the situation your in. I think it's a common >> situation. > Sorry, but I think there is a misunderstanding here. What I said is, > under some jurisdictions, a contributor can not transfer his or her > copyright unless she or he is paid to do the work. > > Have a look at the source of the Linux kernel: Vast parts of the code > are copyright by Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom and so on. > > But all of the code is licensed under the GPLv2. And this means that > those companies have agreed to distribute their code under the rules the > GPLv2 defines. But this also means that they want to retain the rights > on their code. They want to be able to sue anyone who takes their code > and redistributes it under a non compatible license (or even closed > source). This is the copyrights holders right (and plight). > > A rather interesting read is > http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/how-can-the-linux-kernels-main-c-file-say-that-one-of-its-copyrights-is-all-ri > for example. > > There have been mentions of the infamous SCO trials. But there, the > situation is different: SCO claims that vast amounts of their code has > been lifted and transplanted in to the Linux kernel. And such claims can > be made by anyone, against any project. This is just lawyers having a > blast and investors gambling. Right, so the main issue is if the company can state that the employee wrote this code on company time (or had a contract that says anything they do while employed even outside of work hours) is owned by the company, AND that the employee contributed the code without the employers consent. While this is unlikely, consider the (unlikely) scenario: Backup Online company uses BackupPC to sell online backup services to millions of clients Employee makes some changes to BackupPC to better scale to this level, or to natively support the MS Backup tool (is that even possible? doesn't matter). Employee releases these changes back to the BackupPC project, employer sues the employee, and claims copyright infringement. BackupPC project now needs to remove those changes, but even more problematic, needs to re-write the support, and somehow claim that the re-write didn't "use" the original code *at all*... eg, a clean room re-implementation, which is hard (harder to *prove* than a closed source implementation, where the clean room people never had access to the source) when the original was available open source...
Now, lets take the really common scenario. Company sells widgets, and they want to backup their computer systems They have an employee who sees that it isn't working very well, and so they write a patch which allows to support the standard MS Backup tool. Employee releases this patch to BackupPC Company selling widgets is happy, everyone else is happy, no problem. > Another issue that may creep up in this regard are patents. I'm quite > sure that somewhere, some "ingenious" guy has patented "a method to > backup a computer" or "a method to reduce backup footprints by pooling > the files/blocks". There is no real defence against this, other than not > having an entity responsible for the project that could be sued. And if > it happens regardless, move to project to a country where software > patents do not exist. We could also move the project to a country that doesn't support copyrights.... However, the copyright holder could try to sue each individual user of backuppc, assuming they could identify suitable "targets" > I feel that this whole discussion is pointless and a real time sink. All > the effort going into this discussion would better be spent by working > on BackupPC and the infrastructure to support it. All I wanted to say is > that CDAs may not be legally possible for all contributors and that it > would require some institution which may have to be tightly controlled > in order to mitigate the risk of loosing the control over the project. > > And I'm still not a lawyer. > > Therefore, I will refrain from participating in this discussion from now on. I agree, I think trying to setup any company/charity/whatever legal structure is a complete waste of time and money (someone has to pay for it...). We are really only guarding against an employee submitting code which they are legally not permitted to do. Either way, the project itself has never done anything wrong (nobody hacked into their system and knowingly stole the code to contribute, etc)... So, I would strongly advise that we simply carry on. Allow code submissions from anyone, if something comes up on the list that makes some code contribution questionable, then ask the contributor to email the list/issue tracker/etc to confirm that they have their employers permission. The rest is simply a waste of time. Let's move on and start discussing the issues, reviewing and committing the patches already submitted. IANAL either... in fact, probably none of us are, and I doubt any of us are going to pay one for actual advice. Regards, Adam -- Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
