Assignment of copyright put on hold

[Jeffrey Kegler]

For the time being, I'm shelving my plan to add an assignment of copyright line to Libmarpa and Marpa::R2.  David Yingling is the only visible objecter, but that does not mean there are not others out there whom it makes uneasy.

A big factor is that I don't know of any other project which does copyright assignment in this way, which may be a bad sign.

I may re-raise this after some thought, but for now the assignment of copyright policy will stay as it is in all my repos.

In the meantime, further commentary is welcome.

[Deyan Ginev]

One of the projects I am contributing to is driven by the US government, and is thus mandated by law to be released in the Public Domain. After years of wondering what is the right way of assigning copyright for non-gov contributors we ended up with a simple notice in the LICENSE file, together with the chief maintainer informally reminding new contributors that they are waving their copyright on submission. The notice is here:
https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML/blob/master/LICENSE#L20

We initially sent special emails to the maintainer declaring that we waive copyright, but 7 years down the road copyright assignment has never been raised even once as a point of discussion by anyone, be it users or newcomer contributors.

Just a few details from personal experience.

Greetings,
Deyan

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[Jeffrey Kegler]

That's interesting.  I note that that the clause does *not* assign copyright -- that is, the contributor retains copyright, but gives up all the rights that go along with it.  That's the same thing for most purposes, but I think there's a difference if the material is libelous, or something like that, in which case who technically is the copyright holder may make a difference.

[Aria Stewart]

Node.js did for a while, but dropped the policy.

[Jeffrey Kegler]

Re node.js and the CLA:

https://www.joyent.com/blog/broadening-node-js-contributions

http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/06/11/notes-from-the-road/ -- the relevant part is at the end

[David Yingling]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 09:40:42 -0800
Jeffrey Kegler <jeffre...@jeffreykegler.com> wrote:

> For the time being, I'm shelving my plan to add an assignment of copyright
> line to Libmarpa and Marpa::R2. David Yingling is the only visible
> objecter, but that does not mean there are not others out there whom it
> makes uneasy.
>

Are you still going to change the license to MIT? Copyright assignment isn't
needed to change the license. It could have made changing the license easier if
you had started your project with copyright assignment. But adding copyright
assignment now or in the future does not retroactively allow you to take past
contributors' copyrights from them allowing you to more easily change the
license. Copyright assignment is just not needed to change the license.

An interesting corollary exists in academia where copyright assignment is
required to get your papers published in academic journals. They'll often even
prevent authors of papers from putting their paper up on their own Website for
free download, because the whole academic publishing industry relies on big
fees from university libraries to be profitable, and free access scares these
publishers like bittorrent does Hollywood. Academics seem to have accepted
copyright assignment for the most part with some detractors, but open-source
software seems to have rejected it for the most part.

> A big factor is that I don't know of any other project which does copyright
> assignment in this way, which may be a bad sign.
>

I think that is more convincing than any of my arguments are. FSF does it so
they can sue GPL violators more effectively. OpenOffice seems to require
copyright assignment to Sun/Oracle so they can sell StarOffice, but Oracle may
have dumped StarOffice. LibreOffice does not require copyright assignment. As
previously mentioned Ubuntu and Canonical tried copyright assignment, but had
to switch to CLA. It seems copyright assignment has "lost", and if your lawyers
require something like it the company or non-profit uses a CLA instead.

> I may re-raise this after some thought, but for now the assignment of
> copyright policy will stay as it is in all my repos.
>
> In the meantime, further commentary is welcome.
>

[Ron Savage]

See also http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/story/15/01/25/1713251/why-we-still-cant-really-put-anything-in-the-public-domain