On 19.08.2012 13:01, Lennart Regebro wrote:
On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Jens Vagelpohl <j...@dataflake.org> wrote:
On Aug 19, 2012, at 10:17 , Lennart Regebro <rege...@gmail.com> wrote:
And since it becomes ever easier to accept code from unknown sources (e.g. pull
requests) legal code ownership becomes an issue again.
And that returns me to my first question: Is it really legally
different for a contributor to accept a pull request from a
non-contributor compared with a contributor merging a patch from a
non-contributor?
Legally, both are disallowed unless there's some proof (written statement etc)
from the code author that he assigns ownership of the patch or the contents of
that pull request to the contributor who is doing the checkin.
In the past we haven't done a good job of enforcing this clear ownership assignment
chain. There are always code patches from non-contributors in the bug tracker that may
make it into the code base with the help of a contributor. There's a grey area: Is the
act of submitting a patch into the Zope bug tracker enough to signal "I am giving
you ownership of this code"? I am not sure.
GitHub makes this pulling in of "outside" code even easier. I'm afraid it will
become even harder to really maintain this chain of custody.
This is then, IMO a problem that we should fix. What you are in fact
saying is that the current system are violating people's copyright
everytime we merge a non-contributors patch. It is unfeasible to not
merge peoples patches, and I think it is also a big problem that the
way the ownership of the code works now inhibits the increased
simplicity of making and merging fixes for non-core contributors.
In other words, we have had an ownership situation which is terrible,
and nobody seems to have realized this until now. Well, now we know.
As such, the discussion must now shift from "don't do this" to "how do
we do this". Poeple want to contribute and we should not say "don't do
that", we have to figure out *how* to make it possible to do that, and
pretty pronto as well.
Would it stand the law if there would be a written statement inside the
relevant projects stating out that the ownership of code changes as soon
as an outside patch gets applied?
robert
//Lennart
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Squarewave Computing
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