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

2010/11/3 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.

like mine, it's an opinion, of course ;-)

> > i am still waiting to see any reply also to Andrea's proposals
> > in another thread [1]
>
>        Oh - I guess I should reply there.

thanks

> > I agree with Andrea, and I think that all this JCA stuff need a more
> > pragmatic approach
>
>        Honestly; the amount of doom mongering

I guess that with this term you mean "profecy of disaster", something
that in italian we could
name "being a Cassandra". I didn't wanted to be a Cassandra; it only
seems to me that
JCA/CLA and similar issues should be discussed openly, with fresh mind,
evaluating pro and con.

> 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 :-)

No, the issue here regards a really complex project, more than 12 millions
lines of code, I guess, that needs a transition from the "umbrella" of Oracle to
another model; clearly it's important to conduct the transition in a way
that makes feasible to manage the project in the future.

>        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.

I agree; nevertheless, i think we should decide what kind of foundation TDF
would be, and if the foundation could effectively join the interests
all the subjects interested in
LibO (or other projects in the future). Dealing with patent claims is one of
things that i think TDF should take care of, without being necessarily
"doom mongering".

>        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
>
>        ;-)

This dicotomy in my opinion is not reflecting the real situation, nor
I said that
assignments are indispensable. It's a subject should be discussed with
all the players.
By the way, TDF is still not a player, because it still lacks a legal
status ....

bye,
rob


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

--
Unsubscribe instructions: Email to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***