Dear Frank,
On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 16:31 +0100, Frank Schönheit Germany wrote:
> > OpenOffice project code:
> > Sun the only owner: 100%
> > LGPL eclectic (or better) ownership: 0%
>
> the "only" is plain not true, as you very well now. The term is *Joint*
> copyright Assignment. You don't do your standing a good with repeating
> wrong facts.
The intent is not to mislead, but present the reality. I would argue
that talk of "Joint", and "Shared" in copyright assignments (by
contrast) is to market the unpleasant fact with meaningless friendly
sounding terms :-) ie. the plain truth is perhaps not quite as obvious
as you suggest.
Lets take an example in your area:
connectivity/source/drivers/evoab2
I commit it, and wow - we really have a joint ownership ! you are
right :-) it actually fulfills the definition of 'joint'-ness briefly.
by revision 1.3 - 'rt' is changing the license - at least this is
probably only removing headers: so, perhaps I still own it.
but by revision 1.5 my friend Frank commits some warning removal
changes [ thanks :-) ]: and bingo - the only owner of that entire module
is Sun.
Where now the 'joint-ness' ? since I don't own your changes, and (over
time) those are inevitably made to any piece of code if only to stop
bit-rot, the "joint" sense becomes meaningless from day two.
The situation is worse if any two non-Sun people collaborate, say -
Caolan fixes a bug in my brand-new code: despite Sun having never
touched it, it becomes the only owner of the complete work :-)
So, again - I assert that the only real owner of the code is Sun - and
in the tiny fraction of cases where that is briefly not so, it only
needs to touch the module, run indent on it, fix a warning or whatever
and it is so.
Can you articulate any meaningful rights granted by the 'Joint'-ness or
'Shared'-ness of these licenses ? it's possible I'm just missing them
somewhere.
Regards,
Michael.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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