Re: Proposed: evolution (copyright assignment)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 08:07, James M. Cape wrote:
> Looking at the actual requirements, it appears as though copyright
> assignment is only necessary for > 5-consecutive-line changes, so even
> if aliens invade and burn down all the major cities... erm, Novell takes
> Evo proprietary at some future date, they would still have to get
> permission from every < 5-consecutive-line coder who submitted a patch
> to Evo, a daunting task in and of itself. AFAIK, only one of those
> people must say "nope" for the whole deal to be nixed, so I don't really
> see it as an issue.

The reason no assignment is required for <5 lines is that copyright
doesn't really apply to changes that small. Novell does retain the right
to go proprietary, since Evo is GPL they needed this right to do the
Exchange Connector when that piece was proprietary.

> The real question is whether or not copyright assignment allows for
> retroactive license changes. If yes, then that could be a problem. If
> no, then the community can always fork from the date before the license
> change, so copyright assignment is not a threat.

Yes, forking is definitely always possible; the GPL can't be revoked
retroactively.

Havoc