Open Stack

On 01/14/2014 05:28 PM, Colin McNamara wrote:
> Rich, let me take another real world use case.
>
> First, let me reiterate. Stating copyright is for the protection of 
> the individual developer as well as the corporations contributing. It 
> elevates visibility of who owns copyright.

> *Real world use case - Aptira and Training-Guides*
>
> Sean and I started a project within Docs a while back. This goals of 
> this project is to provide Open Source training materials to the 
> community. To achieve these goal we used a mix of content included 
> within OpenStack documentation. About halfway through the effort, one 
> of the guides that we used for a large amount of content got 
> refactored, forcing us to pivot.
>
> Aptira had been participating significantly at that point, and had 
> *contributed their own training programs to the effort. *That 
> corporate contribution of significant content was key to 
> training-guides moving forward. Without a clear a and concise 
> copyright I don’t think it would have been possible.
>
> Either way, I feel like we are debating a philosophy point vs the 
> legal question that was posed earlier. The action that comes out of 
> this discussion is both guidance from the foundations legal council 
> and the opportunity for someone to submit a talk exploring these items.

I posted the initial email, and it was a matter of philosophy, not of 
law, from the beginning. So, yes, I hope we are debating philosophy. 
This was never posed as a legal question. I know how the legalities of 
it work, and they don't depend, even a little bit, on a in-file 
copyright statement. You retain copyright whether or not you state this 
in the .rst file. That's what the Berne Convention says. (Individual 
jurisdictions vary on years that you have that and other details. 
Presumably by the time that it expires, anywhere, this particular 
content will have expired too.)

I don't understand how your example supports putting copyright 
statements in the rst files. You have a clear and concise copyright 
without having your name in the .rst file. It comes from your 
contributor license agreement with the OpenStack foundation, and the 
history provided by the git logs.

Perhaps I've been unclear. My complaint is not with you holding 
copyright - you hold that copyright, by international law, regardless of 
what I or anyone else says. My complaint is with a name in a file, which 
demonstrably contributes to reluctance of new contributors to make 
changes. The "visibility of who owns copyright" makes contributors feel 
that they don't have the right to pitch in. I've heard this from newbie 
contributors, on a dozen projects, for 15 years.

To be clearer, I don't believe that raising the visibility of a 
particular contributor or company should be a goal of any Open Source 
project. It's not about you or me, it's about the community and the 
project. You want visibility, point to the the Stackalytics site. They 
have awesome stats there. Or point to the output of 'git blame'. Indeed, 
whenever it becomes about raising the visibility of a contributor, the 
whole project suffers, and it becomes harder, not easier, for new folks 
to enter the project.

When you contribute that file, you no longer "own" it, even though you 
have copyright to portions of it. If you want to "own" it, then don't 
contribute it to an Open Source project. Again, I'm not talking about 
legalities, I'm talking about philosophy and the *spirit* of Open 
Source. Sure, legally you might still "own" it in some sense, but if 
that's what you care about, why are you contributing it?

So, I ask again, copyright "protects" from what/whom exactly? In the 
example you gave, what "protection" did it give you? And, specifically, 
what protection did it give you that it would not have given you, 
equally, without your name in the .rst file?

I have considerable experience, myself, with contributing copyrighted 
content to Open Source projects. In particular, I contributed large 
portions of my books and company training materials to the Apache httpd 
documentation. My name isn't in any of those documents, which hasn't 
hurt the sales of my books, nor did it hurt the sales of my training 
classes when I was doing that full-time. Nor did it result in my 
forfeiting my copyright. I still retain copyright on those 
contributions, but now that they have been modified by dozens of other 
people it wouldn't be reasonable for me to assert ownership of any of 
that content - it's a collaborative work now ... as is the example that 
you cited.

-- 
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/20140114/54778cd1/attachment.html>