Open Stack

Rich, I'd be curious to know what constitutes fair use or the amount of material permitted to be used without an explicit permission request. And, secondly, which entity would be responsible to addressing those requests? Thanks! - Nermina

On Jan 14, 2014, at 1:59 PM, Rich Bowen <rbowen at redhat.com> wrote:

> 
> 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 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/
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