Re: [tdf-discuss] Copyright Assignments & the Document Foundation

[Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@novell.com>]

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 17:28 +0100, Roberto Resoli wrote:
> Copyright Assignment is nor bad nor good, it's a compromise

	I do not see assignment in -any- way as a compromise; but as an
un-necessary extreme.

> i am still waiting to see any reply also to Andrea's proposals
> in another thread [1] 

	Oh - I guess I should reply there.

> I agree with Andrea, and I think that all this JCA stuff need a more
> pragmatic approach

	Honestly; the amount of doom mongering in this thread is staggering.
Suddenly we somehow 'discovered' that all FLOSS licenses are
un-enforceable, jurisdictionless, that no-one has really contributed
anything, in any binding way to any eclectically owned FLOSS project[1],
and that only mad people would ship that software :-)

	If the rational conclusion of these arguments is that the Linux Kernel,
Mozilla, SAMBA, GNOME, KDE, and by extension -all- Linux distributions
are fundamentally unsafe to ship - then we have a huge and un-fixable
problem; but one that is by far beyond the scope of LibreOffice to fix.

	In particular OpenOffice already has this problem, since it includes
big chunks of Mozilla - which has some form of mild certification of
authenticity - but this only extends to the person doing the committing,
not the code they commit [ from others ] ;-) ie. it is eclectically
owned, and there is no paperwork, or click-through before contributing.

	So at this point, there are two options:

	* throw up arms in dismay, conclude nothing is 'safe', and
	  wander around desparately trying to aggregate stronger
	  rights to the entire codebase in various organisations
		[ which IMHO aggregates problems with it ].
Or:
	* follow the rest of the world including eg. IBM (who are not
	  short of lawyers) who already ship eg. Mozilla, SAMBA and
	  Linux without any of these apparently indispensible
	  assignments

	;-)

	HTH,

		Michael.

[1] - eclectically owned projects are, by far, the vast majority of Free
Software projects.
-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot



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