Re: Licensing and copyright

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

Thanks for pointing out that typo.

I believe with respect to copyright assignment, that the documents used
by the FSF, at least at some point in the past, referred to the name of
a specific project within GNU, rather than a broad, sweeping assignment.
At the least, I'm certain that the FSF would be willing to break it up
if that was desired by a contributor.

This should definitely be included in an explanation of procedure;
thanks for pointing that out.

-Rob

On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 12:26 +0100, Danilo Segan wrote:

> Hi Rob,
> 
> Rob Adams <readams readams net> writes:
> 
> > OK I have prepared a preliminary draft document that I think is a good
> > starting point.
> >
> > You can take a look at:
> > HTML: http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright/
> > PDF:  http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright.pdf
> > XML:  http://readams.net/copyright/gnome-copyright.xml
> >
> > Please send me any comments you have, or if you prefer to directly edit
> > the XML, send me changes in unified context diff format (diff -u).
> 
> Thanks for the good document.
> 
> Comments:
> 
> In 2.3:
>    "The GNOME Foundation does not recommend doing this, however, since
>     the future freedom of the software cannot necessarily be assured
>     if you, for example, assign your copyright to an organization not
>     interesting in keeping the software Free."
> 
> I think it should be s/not interesting/not interested/ ;)
> 
> In 3.1:
>    "...we want to make it possible for commercial software to be
>     written for the GNOME platform."
> 
> That should probably be "proprietary software", because Ximian Desktop
> is very "commercial software" last I've heard, yet it isn't
> proprietary (at least I think it isn't).  And this part is about
> LGPL software, which especially allows proprietary software to link
> against it.
> 
> 
> When one of those "PROCEDURE HERE" is finished, it would be also nice
> to extend it for some common special cases, like translators.  Eg. I
> have sent my disclaimer for any translations I do for TP (Translation
> Project), basically assigning my copyright to FSF for any of those.
> I believe any other translator who's a member of both TP and GTP is
> in the similar situation, so it should be much easier for them to
> assign their copyrights to FSF, if they want to.  Here we come across
> another issue of someone _not_ wanting copyright to their Gnome
> translations to be transferred to FSF, yet they have sent a blanket 
> statement regarding any translations of GNU software to FSF (that's
> how general form from TP looks like).
> 
> Hope this helps, and gives a couple of areas still blury which might
> need describing.
> 
> Cheers,
> Danilo
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