Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)

[Søren Hauberg]

tor, 06 01 2011 kl. 11:12 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
> On  6-Jan-2011, Søren Hauberg wrote:
> 
> | tor, 06 01 2011 kl. 10:53 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
> | > On  6-Jan-2011, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> | > 
> | > | I also think that having a written copyright assignment as a
> | > | precondition to any significant changes could lose you some potential
> | > | contributors. And it's not just because of the copyright itself, but
> | > | because programmers are lazy folk :)
> | > 
> | > It seems not to hurt Emacs or GCC, so what is different about Octave
> | > (or the people who contribute to it)?
> | 
> | On the other hand it seemed to hurt OpenOffice.org quite a bit (it was
> | one of many complaints that ended with the LibreOffice fork).
> 
> I don't know the issues involved there, but was it more about the
> identity of the copyright holder (lack of trust in them?)?  Or that
> there were specific terms in the assignments that were not acceptable?
> Or was it really about peeople not wanting to sign the assignment
> forms?

My impression (I don't know the details) is that Sun (and later Oracle)
required copyright assignment for all changes and that this kept away a
bunch of people with fairly small patches.

> | Personally, I wouldn't find signing over copyright, but it would be time
> | consuming (finding a fax is practically impossible in Denmark, and going
> | to the post office to send a signed document to the US would require an
> | hours work), so I'd rather not (as Jaroslav said: people are lazy).
> 
> It is possible to make an assignment for a single change, but I think
> it is more typical to assign all future changes, so the work only
> needs to be done once.
> 
> Would you be less hesitant if the process were simplified and less
> time consuming?

I've invested enough time in Octave for it not to be a problem even if
it took an hour or two to assign the copyright. I'm more concerned that
it would scare away new people (and we need new people).

> | Also, what about deceased contributors?
> 
> There's not much we can do about that.  IF (and I'm not currently
> pushing too hard for it) we were to start requiring assignments, then
> I would like to get assignments from past contributors, but I would
> not expect that we find everyone.  It would be more important to have
> assignments from current contributors.

Ok.

In case it is not clear, I am NOT against assigning copyright to either
the FSF or to some Octave foundation thingy.

Søren