Mailing List Archive

On Thu, 07 Oct 2004 13:59:47 -0700 Donnie Berkholz
<spyderous@gentoo.org> wrote:
| If everyone agrees to this, we can start adding these to gentoo/src/
| or whatever other location makes sense. I'd guess at least X and
| kernel people would be interested -- maybe others with large
| patchsets, such as toolchain.

You could do what various other people are doing and move it to bkbits /
berlios / wherever and as an added bonus get to use a decent version
control system :)

--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

On Thursday 07 October 2004 21:59, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> In the
> second case, many devs signed an agreement already saying anything they
> wrote and added to Gentoo CVS is Gentoo's.

This always seemed like an odd policy to me. Linus doesn't require
contributions to the kernel to have copyright assigned to him, and I don't
see why we need to. In fact, it works against our ability to enforce
copyrights. Suppose that some UK company starts breaking the copyright of
gentoo in some way, despite the fact that I have written ebuilds etc. I now
have no way of taking legal action against them, as I no longer have any
legal control over my contributions.

Instead of having a large globally distributed group of people each capable of
taking legal action against infringers, we now have one
NFP legal entity that afaik exists (legally) only in 1 US state.

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:47:09PM +0100, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> On Thursday 07 October 2004 21:59, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > In the
> > second case, many devs signed an agreement already saying anything they
> > wrote and added to Gentoo CVS is Gentoo's.
>
> This always seemed like an odd policy to me. Linus doesn't require
> contributions to the kernel to have copyright assigned to him, and I don't
> see why we need to. In fact, it works against our ability to enforce
> copyrights. Suppose that some UK company starts breaking the copyright of
> gentoo in some way, despite the fact that I have written ebuilds etc. I now
> have no way of taking legal action against them, as I no longer have any
> legal control over my contributions.


http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright explains all of this.

Assigning copyright to Gentoo is quite necessary and will not be
changed. This has all been discussed to death back when it was
implemented.


--
Jon Portnoy
avenj/irc.freenode.net

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Friday 08 October 2004 07:47 am, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> This always seemed like an odd policy to me. Linus doesn't require
> contributions to the kernel to have copyright assigned to him, and I don't
> see why we need to.

the reiserfs peeps require any patch you send to them to be completely signed
off ... you have to give them copyright/license/everything over any patch you
send them

> Instead of having a large globally distributed group of people each capable
> of taking legal action against infringers, we now have one
> NFP legal entity that afaik exists (legally) only in 1 US state.

afaik there is work going on in germany which would allow for coverage in the
EU (i think that the EU allows for this ...)
-mike

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 07:04, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright explains all of this.
>
> Assigning copyright to Gentoo is quite necessary and will not be
> changed. This has all been discussed to death back when it was
> implemented.

The question still remains for patches. We can't assign other people's
copyrights for them, so we (apparently) can't keep their patches in CVS,
so there end up being a bunch of different repositories all over the
place to maintain Gentoo packages.

And if we're allowing non-Gentoo-owned patches to be in CVS, all
copyrighted by other people, we should also allow Gentoo devs to retain
copyright on their patches.

What I want here is a way to maintain my patches in a way that allows
shared development without having my own server. Since they're for
Gentoo, it only makes sense to me that I should be able to maintain them
using Gentoo CVS.

Someone brought up the idea of arch yesterday. Maybe that's what I'll
have to do, even though it sucks because it raises the barrier to get
into X. It's tough enough to get recruits now. Making them learn two
separate and very different VCS's will only make it worse.
--
Donnie Berkholz
Gentoo Linux

On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 08:27:15 -0700 Donnie Berkholz
<spyderous@gentoo.org> wrote:
| Someone brought up the idea of arch yesterday. Maybe that's what I'll
| have to do, even though it sucks because it raises the barrier to get
| into X. It's tough enough to get recruits now. Making them learn two
| separate and very different VCS's will only make it worse.

If you want "easy to learn", svn and bitkeeper are both pretty similar
to cvs operation-wise... arch is insanely nasty and does so many things
differently. Plus it's full of hideous bugs :)

--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 08:27:15AM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 07:04, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright explains all of this.
> >
> > Assigning copyright to Gentoo is quite necessary and will not be
> > changed. This has all been discussed to death back when it was
> > implemented.
>
> The question still remains for patches. We can't assign other people's
> copyrights for them, so we (apparently) can't keep their patches in CVS,
> so there end up being a bunch of different repositories all over the
> place to maintain Gentoo packages.
>

Hmm. I thought when we discussed this previously the conclusion was that
since we don't own copyright, we can't reassign copyright, and therefore
it's a moot point and we can keep it in the tree anyway.

> And if we're allowing non-Gentoo-owned patches to be in CVS, all
> copyrighted by other people, we should also allow Gentoo devs to retain
> copyright on their patches.

I agree. IIRC the trustees were going to consult with a lawyer and hash
out fresh copyright assignment terms; when that happens it should
probably address the patch situation.

>
> What I want here is a way to maintain my patches in a way that allows
> shared development without having my own server. Since they're for
> Gentoo, it only makes sense to me that I should be able to maintain them
> using Gentoo CVS.
>
> Someone brought up the idea of arch yesterday. Maybe that's what I'll
> have to do, even though it sucks because it raises the barrier to get
> into X. It's tough enough to get recruits now. Making them learn two
> separate and very different VCS's will only make it worse.

Yeah.

--
Jon Portnoy
avenj/irc.freenode.net

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 10:23:20AM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > Instead of having a large globally distributed group of people each capable
> > of taking legal action against infringers, we now have one
> > NFP legal entity that afaik exists (legally) only in 1 US state.
>
> afaik there is work going on in germany which would allow for coverage in the
> EU (i think that the EU allows for this ...)
> -mike

It exists everywhere but is seated in one US state. This applies for most US
developers, you don't call those "illegal" in other states do you? :)

Anyway, in Belgium the Gentoo Foundation is a valid entity to speak/work
with/for, I'm pretty sure this is the same for every other country/county.

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

--
Documentation & PR project leader

The Gentoo Project <<< http://www.gentoo.org >>>

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 11:42:11AM -0400, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 08:27:15AM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 07:04, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright explains all of this.
> > >
> > > Assigning copyright to Gentoo is quite necessary and will not be
> > > changed. This has all been discussed to death back when it was
> > > implemented.
> >
> > The question still remains for patches. We can't assign other people's
> > copyrights for them, so we (apparently) can't keep their patches in CVS,
> > so there end up being a bunch of different repositories all over the
> > place to maintain Gentoo packages.
> >
>
> Hmm. I thought when we discussed this previously the conclusion was that
> since we don't own copyright, we can't reassign copyright, and therefore
> it's a moot point and we can keep it in the tree anyway.

No, the conclusion was that the patches can not be in the tree.

That is why I ripped the 2.6 kernel patches out of the cvs tree, and
moved them to an external bitkeeper tree.

greg k-h

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 09:28:33AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
>
> No, the conclusion was that the patches can not be in the tree.
>

I guess my memory just sucks.

Are the trustees currently able to start discussions with a lawyer about
a new copyright assignment agreement?

--
Jon Portnoy
avenj/irc.freenode.net

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Friday 08 October 2004 15:04, Jon Portnoy wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:47:09PM +0100, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> >
> > This always seemed like an odd policy to me. Linus doesn't require
> > contributions to the kernel to have copyright assigned to him, and I
> > don't see why we need to. In fact, it works against our ability to
> > enforce copyrights. Suppose that some UK company starts breaking the
> > copyright of gentoo in some way, despite the fact that I have written
> > ebuilds etc. I now have no way of taking legal action against them, as I
> > no longer have any legal control over my contributions.
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright explains all of this.
>
> Assigning copyright to Gentoo is quite necessary and will not be
> changed. This has all been discussed to death back when it was
> implemented.

Except the reasoning is based on the flawed premise:

"This is a benefit because all owners of the code in question must be a party
in any legal action."

This isn't true. The netfilter team have been active in suing GPL violators of
the linux kernel in Europe, which wouldn't have been possible under the
current gentoo policy.

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Mike Frysinger posted <200410081023.20888.vapier@gentoo.org>, excerpted
below, on Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:23:20 -0400:

> the reiserfs peeps require any patch you send to them to be completely
> signed off ... you have to give them copyright/license/everything over any
> patch you send them

That's because they want the flexibility of being able to do private
licenses as well. It's possible that they can't make public certain mods
they may do for the US DOD for instance, and could easily be other
"private" contracts. With their own code, they have that flexibility
since they are the owner. With submitted patches, that isn't the case,
unless they become the owner of those patches as well.

Of course, most here probably know more about the Zynot fork history and
allegations than I do. I did a bit of study into it, including reading
the why fork and etc. docs on his site, and what struck me was how he kept
alleging Gentoo (well, core and DRobbins) had a private for-profit hidden
agenda, while at the /same/ time, he was busy taking advantage of the GPL
licensing (and deliberate policy choice, I expect) of anything Gentoo to
do his fork. It would have been pretty stupid, I thought, for that
license to be chosen, if there /were/ such a hidden agenda, since it not
only allowed forking as he was doing, but prevented taking things private
if they /wanted/ to.

Of course the last clause doesn't hold if Gentoo insists on transfer of
copyright, as it could then be taken private. Not that I expect it will
happen, but the insistence on rights assignment, not only GPL licensing
for any code contributed, /does/ leave open both that possibility, and the
question, for those wishing to make such allegations.

There may be those who prefer GPL and for which that license forms much of
their motivation. These sorts of folks take comfort in for instance the
fact that it'd be practically impossible to change the Linux kernel code
license. There are to many parts owned by to many people, and getting
them all to agree would be essentially impossible, as would rewriting the
parts from those who don't agree, because the code is so interwoven. When
a single entity demands ownership of all code, that barrier to taking it
private disappears. Of course, as with the SSH code which went private,
it can then be forked, but some (including myself) prefer preventing the
possibility of it ever going proprietary-ware in the first place, if at
all possible.

As others have said, I'm sure this has been rehashed before, and I'm not
going to change any minds or policy, particularly since I'm not a Gentoo
dev myself. However, I feel strongly enough about this to react, anyway.
A couple of the guys on my ISP Unix group keep trying to talk me into
going BSD, but I'm really not all that interested, because while I agree
there's a place for BSD style licenses, particularly in code with a goal
of becoming a reference standard, a large part of my motivation is the
fact that I'm supporting a code-returning-to-the-community model, and
there'd simply not be the personal drive behind it, were an MS or an Apple
(or anyone else) to be able to use my supported community code in a
distributed binary and not return their changed back to the pool I'm
supporting. That's why I'm here, not on xBSD.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Sat, 2004-10-09 at 07:13, Duncan wrote:
> Of course the last clause doesn't hold if Gentoo insists on transfer of
> copyright, as it could then be taken private. Not that I expect it will
> happen, but the insistence on rights assignment, not only GPL licensing
> for any code contributed, /does/ leave open both that possibility, and the
> question, for those wishing to make such allegations.

The same holds true for the FSF, which also has all copyright
transferred to it (or given to the public domain). It goes both ways,
and to have the things you GPL'd get defended, you have to have a little
trust. "With great power comes great responsibility."

> There may be those who prefer GPL and for which that license forms much of
> their motivation. These sorts of folks take comfort in for instance the
> fact that it'd be practically impossible to change the Linux kernel code
> license. There are to many parts owned by to many people, and getting
> them all to agree would be essentially impossible, as would rewriting the
> parts from those who don't agree, because the code is so interwoven.

Getting them all to agree when the code is stolen would be difficult as
well.

> When
> a single entity demands ownership of all code, that barrier to taking it
> private disappears. Of course, as with the SSH code which went private,
> it can then be forked, but some (including myself) prefer preventing the
> possibility of it ever going proprietary-ware in the first place, if at
> all possible.

If you don't trust the Gentoo Foundation, there are bigger issues here.
--
Donnie Berkholz
Gentoo Linux

Donnie Berkholz posted <1097343230.24256.9.camel@localhost>, excerpted
below, on Sat, 09 Oct 2004 10:33:50 -0700:

>> There may be those who prefer GPL and for which that license forms much
>> of their motivation. These sorts of folks take comfort in for instance
>> the fact that it'd be practically impossible to change the Linux kernel
>> code license. There are to many parts owned by to many people, and
>> getting them all to agree would be essentially impossible, as would
>> rewriting the parts from those who don't agree, because the code is so
>> interwoven.
>
> Getting them all to agree when the code is stolen would be difficult as
> well.

That's the thing, tho. It doesn't /take/ them all agreeing, to take the
"illegal appropriator" to court. A case in point is the netfilter stuff.
It's in the kernel, but they don't have to get all the kernel contributors
on board before taking alleged violators to court. They are being quite
active with their enforcement, far more active than most folks. It only
takes one guy who's IP has been illegally used to go after them, and if
everyone has signed over copyrights and the organization that they've been
signed over to can't get agreement to enforce, the people that actually
wrote the code can't do much about it, because they no longer have
standing to sue.

>> When a single entity demands ownership of all code, that barrier to taking
>> it private disappears. Of course, as with the SSH code which went
>> private, it can then be forked, but some (including myself) prefer
>> preventing the possibility of it ever going proprietary-ware in the
>> first place, if at all possible.
>
> If you don't trust the Gentoo Foundation, there are bigger issues here.

Well, it's not distrusting the /current/ leadership, but what happens if
there's some legal case that Gentoo loses, and can't pay the court ordered
fees, so the IP ends up either sold at auction to pay the bills, or
defaulted to the person that sued Gentoo? That sort of stuff /does/
happen here in the US.

Having it happen to one guy's code, as it might, is easier to work around
than having it happen to "the whole enchilada".

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Friday 08 October 2004 18:28, Greg KH wrote:
>
> No, the conclusion was that the patches can not be in the tree.
>
> That is why I ripped the 2.6 kernel patches out of the cvs tree, and
> moved them to an external bitkeeper tree.

If that is true, it is all the more reason to change this. I don't know about
the patches. I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches
are assigned to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright
assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright Gentoo
Foundation 200x)

Paul

--
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

On Friday 08 October 2004 13:47, Chris Bainbridge wrote:

> Instead of having a large globally distributed group of people each capable
> of taking legal action against infringers, we now have one
> NFP legal entity that afaik exists (legally) only in 1 US state.

It is based in New Mexico. That does not mean however that the foundation does
not have full worldwide powers. That's how these things work. Countries
recognize eachother's ideas of a company.

Paul

--
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

On Sunday 10 October 2004 2:37 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> we could also do it by simple copyright
> assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright Gentoo
> Foundation 200x)

I'm somewhat dubious as to whether that would have any legal standing as a
copyright assignment, though IANAL.


--
Anthony Gorecki
Ectro-Linux Foundation

On Sunday 10 October 2004 9:37 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches are assigned
> to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright assignment (e.g.
> putting a header on the patch which says Copyright Gentoo Foundation 200x)

Doing this would prevent such patches from being submitted upstream to
projects with just as absurd a policy (copyright assigned to only them). This
kind of policy really prevents open source from being any better than
proprietary software-- if both projects require exclusive ownership of the
code, then either one or the other can use it, not both.
--
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios
http://utopios.org/

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:36:57 +0000 Luke-Jr <luke-jr@utopios.org> wrote:
| On Sunday 10 October 2004 9:37 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
| > I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches are
| > assigned to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright
| > assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright
| > Gentoo Foundation 200x)
|
| Doing this would prevent such patches from being submitted upstream to
| projects with just as absurd a policy (copyright assigned to only
| them). This kind of policy really prevents open source from being any
| better than proprietary software-- if both projects require exclusive
| ownership of the code, then either one or the other can use it, not
| both.--

No, it just means that the patches in question would have to go in
mirror://gentoo/ rather than in ${FILESDIR}.

--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, Sparc, Mips)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

On Sunday 10 October 2004 8:47 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 20:36:57 +0000 Luke-Jr <luke-jr@utopios.org> wrote:
> | On Sunday 10 October 2004 9:37 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> | > I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches are
> | > assigned to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright
> | > assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright
> | > Gentoo Foundation 200x)
> |
> | Doing this would prevent such patches from being submitted upstream to
> | projects with just as absurd a policy (copyright assigned to only
> | them). This kind of policy really prevents open source from being any
> | better than proprietary software-- if both projects require exclusive
> | ownership of the code, then either one or the other can use it, not
> | both.--
>
> No, it just means that the patches in question would have to go in
> mirror://gentoo/ rather than in ${FILESDIR}.

Assuming it is patches that is the issue. This would still be an issue if
someone wanted to mix Portage code (some generic function, perhaps) with
another program that has the same policy.
--
Luke-Jr
Developer, Utopios
http://utopios.org/

Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> If that is true, it is all the more reason to change this. I don't know about
> the patches. I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches
> are assigned to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright
> assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright Gentoo
> Foundation 200x)

The patches under discussion here (gentoo kernel patches) are a different
issue - most of these are not written by us, but they are taken from the
prerelease kernels upstream. Thats why we had to take them out of our CVS,
theres no way we could have claimed ownership or copyright on them, which was
in conflict with the copyright assignment agreement.

Daniel

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

On Sunday 10 October 2004 22:36, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Sunday 10 October 2004 9:37 am, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> > I feel that it is our best interest if developer made patches are
> > assigned to gentoo, but we could also do it by simple copyright
> > assignment (e.g. putting a header on the patch which says Copyright
> > Gentoo Foundation 200x)
>
> Doing this would prevent such patches from being submitted upstream to
> projects with just as absurd a policy (copyright assigned to only
> them). This kind of policy really prevents open source from being any
> better than proprietary software-- if both projects require exclusive
> ownership of the code, then either one or the other can use it, not
> both.

What I meant is that developers (helped by a written statement) assign
developer written/made patches to gentoo. Such patches would so contain a
copyright statement. If the patches are from someone else there would be
no statement and it is clear that the copyright is not with gentoo. The
copyright statement would then make clear where the copyright lies. If
developers want to defent their own copyright on a patch they will not
put a "copyright Gentoo Foundation" header in the file but e.g. a
"Copyright Paul de Vrieze" header.

Paul

--
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

Donnie Berkholz wrote: [Thu Oct 07 2004, 04:59:47PM EDT]
> If everyone agrees to this, we can start adding these to gentoo/src/
> or whatever other location makes sense. I'd guess at least X and
> kernel people would be interested -- maybe others with large
> patchsets, such as toolchain.

I've read this whole thread and haven't yet seen a reason we can't do
this, i.e. designate an area for non-Gentoo patches in cvs. Though I
think it would make more sense to create a new cvs module called
"non-gentoo"

Did I miss an argument against this in the thread?

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer

I also just realized I responded to a thread from three weeks ago.
Sorry if it's no longer relevant...

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer