Open Stack

On 01/14/2014 01:44 PM, Colin McNamara wrote:
> So, on one hand we have a perceived reticence to contribute to 
> copyrighted works (which I believe is a valid point)

It's a valid point only if one doesn't understand how copyright works, 
and/or doesn't understand how Open Source works. And I suppose that most 
of our corporate lawyers fall into the latter category. But that means 
that it's our job to educate them.

>
> On the other hand, we have the reality that clearly stating copyright 
> on a file helps to protect the contributors in the community (by 
> clearly demonstrating who holds copyright)

This is not only not true (Git has a full audit trail of who owns 
copyright on which bit, and Copyright is "protected" regardless of 
whether you state it) but also seems to miss the point of contributing 
to Open Source in the first place.

First of all, protect against what, and against whom? If you don't want 
your stuff reused, remixed, redistributed, and bent, spindled and 
mutilated, then you shouldn't be contributing it to a project that's 
under the Apache license.

If you contribute a piece of prose to OpenStack, do you intend that it 
can't be reused by other members of the OpenStack community? Are you 
going to sue someone that uses excerpts from the documentation in a 
conference presentation or book?

If I write a paragraph and you correct my grammar, and someone else 
rearranges the paragraph for clarity, who has copyright on that 
collaborative work, and furthermore, who cares?

And if any copyright statement discourages even one person from 
contributing to the docs, hasn't it undone any good that it has done?

>
> This may be a good opportunity for an article on OpenStack.org 
> <http://OpenStack.org> as well a session at the design summit.
>

Well, at the least, I'm writing a blog post, which will presumably show 
up on planet.openstack at some point.


-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
OpenStack Community Liaison
http://openstack.redhat.com/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-docs/attachments/20140114/3a519685/attachment.html>