Peter Vandenabeele wrote: > On 10/8/07, Mathias Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Please write it more exactly: that the copyright must be shared with Sun. > > For my understanding, a generic question: > > If a piece of software has: > > "Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens, Jan Peeters" > > or > > "Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens > Copyright (C) 2007 Jan Peeters" > > Is that an AND or an OR relationship ? > > Can both seperately, individually, without agreement from the other, > give away licenses on the code (Peter OR Jan can give a license) > > or must both jointly, in agreeement, together agree to give a license > on the code (Peter AND Jan must agree to give a license).
IANAL, so I have to apply human logic, though this rarely is compatible to legal considerations. ;-) The copyright owner of a particular source file can relicence this file under any licence he wants. In case of a joint copyright this applies to both partners, independently from each other. So if Sun e.g. wanted to change OOo's licence to LGPLv3 or GPLv3 this is possible without formal agreement of all partners that have the joined copyright of at least a part of the source code. OTOH if a contributor wanted to licence his contributed code to someone else with e.g. a BSD licence he is free to do so without asking Sun or any other party that owns the copyright of a part of the OOo code base. But of course this does not influence all the other code in OOo whose copyright he not jointly owns. This procedure was used by Sun when the SISSL was dropped some time ago and it used by contributors that additionally to the LGPL licence required by OOo also licence their code under GPL. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
