> The reason why he is only partly correct is because it depends on the
> copyright on the contributed code, not who made the commits.
Sorry, that's not exactly correct. US copyright law says that a
copyright is created when the work is created, or a derivative work is
made, and only is transferred if there is an explicit transfer of
copyright. To my knowlege, no one made an explicit transfer of
copyright, except for my statement yesterday that I am transferring
all my contributions to Doug. Now, you could argue that by not
amending the copyright notice when creating a derivative work, that
the intention was to transfer copyright, and you could argue that by
not identifying it as owned by someone that they had abandoned their
copyright interest, but it would be just that -- an argument -- that
you'd have to make to a judge if anyone actually wanted to assert
their copyright rights in portions of code they created. And I
suspect you'd have a hard time actually convincing a judge to rule in
your favor.
Copyright law is pretty complicated; it doesn't work exactly they way
you think it ought to. Its just that these things are so rarely
contested in ths community (few contributors to OS projects are likely
to try and assert any copyright rigthts, so it just doesn't happen.)
> The ASF also has a policy that the code must be copyright to the ASF as well
> for this purpose. That way, it is the ASF which can control the code and
> distribution of the code.
Out of curiosity, can you show me where it says that? The written
policy I've seen says something like "can be released under the terms
of the ASL", which doesn't mean exactly the same thing.
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