Re: Future code ownership

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche at redhat dot com>]

Hi -


Speaking merely as an interested individual sympathetic outsider, I
wonder if jifl correctly understands SPI's relationship to other
projects it is associated with:

> 6) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a US not-for-profit
> organisation. <http://www.spi-inc.org/> Its goals are to advance open
> source. They are well known already as the copyright holders of many
> well known projects like Debian Linux, GNOME, LSB as well as owners of
> the Open Source marque, and so on.

A quick cursory browse of a bunch of pieces of the gnome distribution
shows copyright notices from all sorts of players, FSF, Red Hat, and
many individuals.  I didn't actually see any SPI copyright notices.

There were a few listed drawbacks of a mixed-copyright future for
eCos.  Maybe they are not too serious:

The problem of lack of single copyright enforcement agent would not be
diminished if some of the new code was assigned to SPI or somesuch,
for there would still be Red Hat (C) code in there.  (Or is one of the
ideas to get Red Hat to reassign to SPI too?)

The problem of uncertainty about the trustworthiness of contributors to
submit code unimpeded by corporate copyright is not going to go away in
any case.  You might try requiring submitters to specify the appropriate
copyright notice for the new code, in effect making it their onus to
determine/state corporate impact.  You could then take it at face value.

The problem of shipping relicensed (non-GPL) eCos derivatives is probably
moot unless Red Hat Officials Of Great Highness see it fit to come to
an agreement with you guys.  (I clearly have no clue about this.)  If
no such agreement occurs, then license revenue matters become moot.
(... or you could rewrite all that existing code! :-)


- FChE