What is the copyright of a patch waiting for approval?
James Boston
Person 'A' submits a patch to bugzilla.mozilla.org. It's waiting to be
approved. Person 'B' comes along and see a snippet of code that would
be great for his patch to submit to mozilla. Is this allowed?
What is the copyright of the patch?
A slightly different scenario would be a patch that is not accepted
but someone else wants to take it and rework it.
I don't see any blurbs at developer.mozilla.org about whether or not
copyright is assigned, either at the time of submitting or after.
CzNlgo
> Here's the scenario:
>
> Person 'A' submits a patch to bugzilla.mozilla.org. It's waiting to be
> approved. Person 'B' comes along and see a snippet of code that would
> be great for his patch to submit to mozilla. Is this allowed?
Sure.
> What is the copyright of the patch?
Copyright laws are "Fiction of Law",
ie: they are Not "Constitutional".
Welcome to the open-source revolution.
My opinions are un-orthodox;
& they are not appropriate for those who seek to work
from within the proprietary/corporate/empirical universe.
Charles Stewart
Sandy Oregon
> A slightly different scenario would be a patch that is not accepted
> but someone else wants to take it and rework it.
>
> I don't see any blurbs at developer.mozilla.org about whether or not
> copyright is assigned, either at the time of submitting or after.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> legal mailing list
> le...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
>
Benjamin Smedberg
> Here's the scenario:
>
> Person 'A' submits a patch to bugzilla.mozilla.org. It's waiting to be
> approved. Person 'B' comes along and see a snippet of code that would
> be great for his patch to submit to mozilla. Is this allowed?
>
> What is the copyright of the patch?
When people attach patches to existing code in bugzilla, we assume that they
are implicitly tri-licensing them (otherwise they wouldn't have permission
to attach the patches in the first place). But if there's any question, it's
better to ask then assume!
> I don't see any blurbs at developer.mozilla.org about whether or not
> copyright is assigned, either at the time of submitting or after.
The Mozilla project never uses copyright assignment. Copyright is owned by
whoever attached the patch. The question is whether they *licensed* that
code under the appropriate open source license.
--BDS