Hi Lawrence, Thanks very much for your informative email.
On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 08:24 -0800, Lawrence Rosen wrote: > An ASF copyright notice can be placed only (1) on the ASF website itself and > on related expressive pronouncements of the ASF board of directors, its > officers or agents created on behalf of ASF and published to the world as > ASF's "voice"; (2) on the CVS data bases containing the Contributions > collected, selected and arranged in accordance with ASF-authorized > processes. The former are generally *original work* copyrights; the latter > are *collective work* copyrights. (A more general term for collective works > under US copyright law would be a *compilation work* but that's not an > important distinction for this thread and would be confusing to all > programmers.) In some cases, third parties or the ASF itself may create > modifications of (1) and (2). Only if ASF itself does the modification may > it (3) place its *derivative work* copyright notice on that work. See 17 USC > 101. I presume (as Roy Fielding mentions) that there is also the possibility for the author of a work to assign copyright to the ASF? In which case Copyright 2005 The Apache Foundation would be the correct copyright statement to include in the file? This would seem to be the case for a significant amount of code developed by ASF committers. We *want* to create code that will belong to the "ASF Community". > ASF will not remove (indeed, should not remove) any pre-existing copyright > notices. Isn't the ASF legally entitled to specify any preconditions it wants to before accepting donated works? And that those preconditions can include: * that the author of the work grant the ASF a copyright on the work in addition to their own copyright, and * that the author grants the ASF the right to move the existing copyright statement to an external file. It seems to me that this is what the current policy (as explained by Jennifer) does. Is this not legal? Or is it just that the ASF hasn't properly got contributor's agreement to this? And if an author has granted the ASF copyright on a work, then isn't the ASF entitled to insert their copyright statement into the work even if no other modification has been made to it? BTW, isn't this "grant of copyright" what GNU insist on for its contributors? > You are absolutely right that it would be improper to place an ASF copyright > notice on files that are "contributed in their entirety and are not modified > by ASF or other contributors." What I don't then understand is why the ASF > should want to change those existing copyright notices at all. Just leave > them alone. > As is mentioned, there is the matter of community/identity and free software "principles". I certainly would not feel happy about contributing my time to improving code whose *only* copyright statement referred to some large commercial entity. That doesn't mean removing all acknowledgement of the original contributor. Having said that, if we are talking about having two copyrights on some files, eg Copyright 2001 Big Corporation Ltd Copyright 2001-2005 The Apache Software Foundation then this seems reasonable acknowledgement for large contributions of code initially developed outside the ASF. Is this what you mean by "Just leave them alone"? If we are talking about copyrights added for each bugfix or minor improvement: Copyright 2001 Big Corporation Ltd Copyright 2002 John Smith [bugfix #12345] Copyright 2002 Sue Smith [bugfix #12346] Copyright 2003 Acme Corporation [added comments] this seems likely to destroy all sense of community. Regards, Simon --------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: Discussions on this list are informational and educational only, are not privileged and do not constitute legal advice. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
