Re: HP gdb/wdb sources available

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:02:46PM -0700, James E Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 13:30, Steve Ellcey wrote:
> > The purpose of this delivery is to assign the copyright of any HP
> > generated changes in these files to FSF so that non-HP folks can take
> > any of the changes that HP made and incorporate them into the FSF gdb
> > sources without worrying about HP copyright ownership.  I have a
> > copyright assignment on file with FSF.
> 
> This doesn't seem to make much sense.
> 
> Simply placing the files on an FSF machine does not constitute a
> copyright assignment.  A copyright assignment requires a piece of paper
> with appropriate language approved by the FSF and signed by a VP or
> higher at HP that covers the code in question.  (And by the way, this
> isn't an FSF machine, so by placing something here, you haven't actually
> given it to the FSF.)
> 
> Also, your copyright assignment only covers code that you wrote
> yourself.  If you give code to the FSF, that does not cause the code to
> be covered by your copyright assignment.  We need a copyright assignment
> from the original author of the code.  If HP has a corporate assignment,
> then that would be sufficient.  Otherwise, we need personal assignments
> from everyone that helped write the code, along with corporate
> disclaimers for each person.  If you haven't been keeping records of who
> wrote which piece of code (such as FSF style ChangeLog entries), then
> only a corporate assignment will do.

I am inclined to agree with Jim's concerns about copyright assignments.

I took a look at copyright.list, and could not figure out whether this
was covered by HP's prior assignments; they have a number of
assignments covering GDB but I don't think any of them were "and future
changes".

Jim, as for the actual act of putting it on sourceware.org, my
understanding is that it acts as a public release in tandem with the
announcement.  We've done this for large GDB drops from other companies
(ACT, Apple) in the past and gotten consensus that it was the right way
to go.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery, LLC