Open Stack

Agreed, (I didn’t even know that list existed btw). 
Regards,

Colin

Colin McNamara
People | Process | Technology
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On Jan 15, 2014, at 3:53 AM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org> wrote:

> 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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> 
> 
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