Rich Freeman wrote: > >> This is part of the set of topics which we > >> cover outside the scope of the quizzes. > > > > A brief comment from reality is that this legal problem is quit > > likely a significant hurdle for many potential developers - as for me. > > > > If you want contributing to be easy, overhead like this can't exist. > > It isn't clear to me what the overhead is here. > > The only things devs need to do with respect to copyright is follow > the law
Ah, but which law? I understand that law in e.g. Germany does not permit non-natural persons to own copyright. The public domain concept is also not recognized world-wide. So a German citizen who wants to contribute an ebuild now has a significant legal questionmark on their hands, when actually they just want to publish an ebuild. > and ensure that ebuilds have the correct copyright notice. Define correct... ;) > It would be nice if we could just tell our developer candidates that > they don't have to be concerned with copyright at all, but that would > not be very good for any of us. Every author of every work is automatically concerned with copyright. I think Gentoo's policy of requiring copyright assignment would be better replaced with a policy of requiring a (ideally specific) very permissive license, something like MIT or BSD-2. > Gentoo is very careful to comply with copyright law Sure. Being governed by US law is a whole different topic. //Peter
