Hi Daniel, > > I'm also curious as to why people should be expected to assign > > copyright to a group that is known for licence violations and > > removing attribution from documents. How does this protect > > anything? > > Copyright assignment (first to Gentoo Technologies, Inc., then to > Gentoo Foundation, Inc.) has *ALWAYS* been Gentoo policy. Not quit true, it *had* been policy:
1) Since the copyright agreement has been taken back by the foundation several gentoo devs joined who never agreed on assigning copyright of their work to the foundation. 2) There are countries who acutally adhere to the Berne Convention (1886). This means even the deed of commiting sources with a "Copyright (C) XXXX Gentoo Foundation" is useless in most countries of the EU. E.g, *none* of the stuff that I ever commited to Gentoo's repositories is copyrighted (solely) by the Gentoo Foundation, due to me being German citizen and writing that stuff in Germany. FYI, there isn't even something like Copyright in Germany. We have an "Author's right" which agree with the Berne Convention and deviates from copyright in several points. > 1) Any material created by Gentoo developers, as part of an official > Gentoo Project, needs to have copyright assigned to the Gentoo > Foundation, whether or not it is currently included in the Portage > tree. This protects all of our collective contributions against > misuse, which is why it is policy. As I pointed out above, that's useless. See the Berne Convention and keep in mind that only half of the (active) developers come from the US. > 2) Any material not assigned to the Gentoo Foundation cannot be > considered an official Gentoo Project. It would not fall under the FUD. Honestly, Gentoo as a project should not care if it is copyrighted to the Foundation. The *Foundation* should strive to work with the Authors on a mutually acceptable way of copyrighting it. > umbrella/scope of the development project that is Gentoo, which is in > part a legal structure to protect our collective work, (code, logos, > etc.) and would be considered a third-party project. > > I'd be really surprised - flabbergasted, really - if this has > changed. But at this point I almost wouldn't be surprised. :) Suprise! :-) Danny -- Danny van Dyk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Gentoo/AMD64 Project, Gentoo Scientific Project -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
