Open Stack

All,

Passion appreciated, but this thread does not belong on this mailing list.

Please move it to legal-discuss :)


Regards,


Tom




On 15/01/14 09:15, Rich Bowen wrote:
>
> 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/
>
>
>
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