IANAL Nadav Har'El wrote: > I don't think the situation is as clear-cut as this. It is obvious that > I create a free software project, let other people help and half of the > code ends up to be code contributed by other people, then I don't have the > right to relicense the complete project without asking everyone else. > Just amend that to "relicense the complete project *under an incompatible license*..." to address Shlomi's nit-picking. > When someone sends you a patch for your free software project, without > stating anything about copyright, what does that mean? Is he keeping his > copyright and only letting you use it in the GPL software, Yes. That is exactly what it means. > Perhaps some other variables, > like the size of the patch (one line bug fix, vs. 1000 lines of a new > feature), the development structure of the project (one main developer who > get sent patches, vs. many developers cooperating in Subversion), and so > on, play a role in deciding which interpretation makes sense? > No, they don't. Where they do play a role, however, is on whether the patch is at all copyrightable as a separate piece of work. You can claim, and quite convincingly, that a single line patch that says: < a = b; > a += b;
if a functional description of a change that needs to be done to your code, and therefor not subject to copyright protection. If that is the case, no one has copyright over the patch, and therefor the question is moot. Assuming the patch contains enough to be subject to copyright, then the copyright is the submitter's unless agreed otherwise. > Of course, it's always safest to make things explicit. Not necessarily. I can claim I own the copyright for the above patch all I want, it doesn't make it copyrightable. > Large American free > software organizations, like the FSF and the ASF, have gone as far as having > with written forms and beurocracies which you need to fill before you're > allowed to make large scale code contributions to them. That's because copyright assignment needs to be explicit, retaining copyright being the default. In other words, unless they have a clear proof that you assigned copyrights to them, you have a valid claim that you didn't. > But even those > organizations don't apply the same level of beurocracy to small contributions: > when you send a relatively-small patch to a GNU or Apache project, a > maintainer just accepts it from you and applies it. It is implied that you > do NOT retain your copyright on that contribution See above. If your patch did not contain enough to be copyrightable, then there is no copyright to retain, and thus no copyright to transfer. > - rather the FSF or ASF > does. More like - they hold the copyright for the complete work, and they added a small piece of public domain code, which means they still hold the copyright to the complete work. A gross over-simplification can claim that the Unix source code case with Novel vs. BSD is a case where so many small, probably non-copyrightable changes were made, that the entire piece turned into public domain. > If the FSF decides to release all its code one day using the GPL 3, > nobody is going to ask me whether I agree that they do that with the bug-fix > patch I contributed to Gzip a few years ago. > > Assuming that the original license said "or later", nobody needs to ask you even if you did retain copyright. The new release is allowed (in this case, explicitly) by the old license. In other words - you gave permission when you first submitted the patch. Again, IANAL. Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
