After discussing this issue with Adam Au, our VP of engineering our preference is for changes/fixes that require copyrights to assign them to the company, but we are pretty flexible about it and will defer to Samba team's desires.
Dave Daugherty Centrify > -----Original Message----- > From: samba-technical-boun...@lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-technical- > boun...@lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Bartlett > Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 9:02 PM > To: Jeremy Allison > > 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 > > -- > Andrew Bartlett > http://samba.org/~abartlet/ > Authentication Developer, Samba Team http://samba.org -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba