Andrew Bartlett wrote: > On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 14:19 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> Some history. Samba has historically only accepted code >> with personal, not corporate copyright attached. >> >> There were a couple of good reasons for this in the past, one >> of which was that we preferred GPL enforcement decisions >> to be made by individuals, not by corporations. >> >> Under GPLv2, a license violator loses all rights under the >> license and these have to be reinstated by the copyright >> holders, which made controlling who those copyright holders >> were very important. People are usually much more reasonable >> than corporations :-). >> >> With the move to GPLv3, this is much less important than it once >> was. The GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, allows an automatic reinstatement of >> rights under the license if a violator cures the license violation >> problem within 30 days. >> >> Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly >> to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm >> not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still >> prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the >> Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past). >> >> The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is >> for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time, >> we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to >> LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing >> like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from >> a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the >> engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal >> or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that >> might be moved into a library. >> >> But for things like build fixes for specific platforms, >> I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on >> personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers >> from giving us good fixes. >> > > My main concern is that it will make it harder to explain the line at > which we require a company that becomes gradually involved in Samba to > jump though the hoops for individual copyright. This is typically a > very tedious process, particularly because of the lack of a standard > guidance from the Team (because is is typically a modification to > employment agreements, and because they are both confidential and > different per company). > > But in exactly the same sense, I personally feel quite bad about scaring > a company off making wiki contributions (about how to do smartcards and > Samba4) because our policy had no distinction between types of > contributions. It would have been really good to have their experiences > in the wiki - and I'm sure the same applies to build fixes and other > small but important changes. > > Andrew Bartlett > >
Can we make it easier for an individual contributor to avoid the problem entirely? If I do not wish to claim copyright, I have to realize that to do so I assign copyright to the conservancy, and the wiki asks me to contact a team member if I wish to do so. I'd far rather have it clear how I can contribute without triggering a long discussion with a puzzled IT manager who literally thinks I'm talking about "shareware". Having the considerations set out under a heading like "Contributing Without Claiming Copyright" would be a real benefit to anyone wishing to contribute but concerned about committing his employer to a new and highly unfamiliar legal regime. --dave (now on full time with a former customer) c-b -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest dav...@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain (416) 223-8968 -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba