On Aug 8, 2010, at 11:34 PM, Brett Porter wrote: > > On 09/08/2010, at 12:39 PM, Mark Derricutt wrote: > >> Wouldn't this have the same problem with Apache based code? Doesn't the >> Apache Contributor agreements say you assigned copyright over to Apache? > > No, it doesn't. >
It is a grant not assignment, clause 2 of the CLA[1]. So the ASF owns the copyright over the whole body of code by each individual contributor granting copyright, but the individual still retains copyright of their own submissions. It's a nice gesture but in practical terms what are you really going to do with your portion of the copyrighted code? At Eclipse there is no grant or assignment of copyright. The effect is that once the code is EPL, done by the initial submission of the code to the Eclipse Foundation, it is in practical terms impossible to relicense. The code could be forked or extended but it's going to be very hard to relicense it. Unless you wanted to track down every contributor to get an grant/assignment of copyright which would be required to perform said relicensing. At Apache the contributor and the ASF are owners of the submission. At Eclipse the contributor retains ownership[2]. At Sonatype we honestly take a defensive posture and ask for everything. If it's for a product like Nexus we don't want there to be any question and we're not going to take any changes without full assignment. If you don't like it you don't have to contribute. If it's for something like Tycho, of M2E, or Aether that we incubate at Sonatype for a year we don't want to have to go track down everyone for a copyright assignment in order to relicense the code. This would also be the case if for something like Nexus we wanted to go from the GPL to EPL which is something we are considering. [1]: http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt [2]: http://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#USEINANOTHER > - Brett > > -- > Brett Porter > br...@apache.org > http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@maven.apache.org > Thanks, Jason ---------------------------------------------------------- Jason van Zyl Founder, Apache Maven http://twitter.com/jvanzyl --------------------------------------------------------- A party which is not afraid of letting culture, business, and welfare go to ruin completely can be omnipotent for a while. -- Jakob Burckhardt
