I would like to see formal assignment of copyright to the ASF happen. The concept of (c) completely held by the ASF is what distinguishes us from pretty much everything else out there. W/o that, I don't believe that we can relicense anything, as an example, without a specific side-agreement from each contributor for which a (c) is in the license or notice file. That's an administrative headache I'm not interested in.
more inline.
On Sep 26, 2004, at 11:37 AM, Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Sep 24, 2004, at 10:27 PM, Jennifer B Machovec wrote:
Traditionally, the only time we distribute code under someone else's
copyright is when we are including other works as a convenience for our
users, such as packaging something in a distribution. Otherwise, we
tend not to host projects owned by other entities. Sourceforge is good
for that.
Incorrect.
Not "Incorrect". Show me software in the ASF that is not (c) ASF, besides standard APIs or such. We may have attributed (c) ASF by mistake, or incorrectly, but it is all (c) ASF except for inclusions of outside works for packaging convenience.
Individual CLAs do not assign copyright to ASF, only a copyright licence. Thus ASF is all the time distributing code that it does not hold the copyright on. Code is distributed under a licence, the ASL for projects at ASF, not a copyright.
I'm familiar with the details of the issue, and understand the difference.
See Roy's e-mail on the general@incubator.apache.org list
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg? [EMAIL PROTECTED]&msgNo=4143
For corporate initial code contributions (software grants) to ASF (like Derby & Beehive) I'm not sure if it's common to assign copyright to ASF or not. The generic software grant agreement at http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt does not assign copyright to ASF.
As it's an oversight, we'll fix it.
As Noel has said, this copyright issue is not specific to Derby.
Derby has indirectly raised the issue that those copyright ASF
statements in other ASF projects may actually be incorrect, and thus
cause potential legal problems for the ASF in the future. They may be
incorrect because ASF does not hold copyright on the code, therefore why
is it copyright ASF? A possibly correct claim is that ASF holds
copyright on the collection of contributions that make up a project.
That certainly is a correct claim, but I'm interested in us holding the (c) for any part of the collective work that we distribute that is sourced at the ASF.
[SNIP]
Derby is being distributed under the ASL v2 and will be like other ASF projects in that copyright will be held by a number of parties.
Well, it's not being distributed yet. I see no reason why the (c) in this case can't be held by the ASF - all IBM has to do is assign copyright. If IBM is not inclined to do that, I'd like to see them formally state that, so we can stop spending time on this.
Going with the ASF holds copyright on the collection that is the
project, we have a proposed comment in each file that is as follows. For
some reason that I don't understand Roy seem to object to this and the
proposed notice file contents, though it may have been due to the
addition of the term "All rights reserved" (which I do not believe we need).
That's exactly why, but I'll push further and suggest that IBM shall simply assign copyright to the ASF.
geir
-- Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
