Urho3D copyright holder

[Jenge]

The copyright holder of the Urho3D sources and license file is listed as "Copyright (c) 2008-2013 the Urho3D project"

Is the "Urho3D project" a legal entity that can hold the copyright?  If not, this is probably an important thing to address as usage of project, in whole or part, becomes more popular?

- Josh

[Lasse Öörni]

Hi,
it's not a legal entity. In that sense the copyright line isn't legally valid. However naturally each contributor (we try to keep an up-to-date list) retains his/her own copyright to the work contributed and can take legal action if necessary.

[Jenge]

Having gone through multiple "due diligence" lawyer passes on tech licensing, I am not sure that this would fly.  Having every contributor hold an individual copyright with no agreement in place seems like an easy, but problematic solution.  I don't see really any other examples of this in the wild, other than code copyrighted by a "foundation" which is a formal entity.  I think I understand the intent, and I think it totally works for a "pet project", but do you see a problem here?

How about you having the copyright?

- Josh

[Jenge]

BTW, these kind of legal discussions are really annoying and its rough as no one is a lawyer.  However, the Urho tech is really awesome and as more people start using it, I think you might start finding it in unexpected places :)  Having a copyright line that isn't technically valid seems like something to address.

- Josh

[Jenge]

Actually, the current system may be just fine as finding some examples of similar setups out there.  Still, would have no problem with having you as an "overall copyright holder" if this made sense.

- Josh

[Lasse Öörni]

In the early days when only my code existed in the repository, the copyright indeed had my name.

When multiple people started contributing I "copied" the style of the copyright notice from the kNet library that Urho uses, which also has multiple contributors and assigns the copyright notice nebulously to the "project".

I wouldn't personally like a contributor agreement where people would have to assign co-copyright to me, basically when people contribute they only have to agree that the code is released under MIT license. There is also no corporate entity connected to the library from my side (it started purely as an individual free time project) so there's nothing compared to eg. Ogre's Torus Knot Software to assign copyright to.