One of the reasons why the ASF was created was to provide a legal umbrella
for the code; to shield the developers from any potential lawsuits or
infringement issues, for example, and to be able to make sure the project
lives on even after developers leave. Something similar may happen for
Tigris.org in the future; this is becoming slightly more important right
now since I got a letter from the current owner of the "Tigris" trademark
asking me to stop using it, which I and CN haven't responded to yet, but
will soon. This is much more important than having the ability to defend
the copyright against possible infringers, though I would like to have
that ability too, since I it's important to me that the terms of the
license be followed.
Anyways, when one is created, or there's some other acceptable entity to
own the copyrights, then I probably will ask people to sign contributor
agreements. The ASF has had no problem in asking for this, though it can
be a headache. If anyone wants to see the Apache contributor agreement
(which we'd probably use), I can forward a copy.
Brian
On 22 Feb 2001, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Jim Blandy <jimb@zwingli.cygnus.com> writes:
> > Are we collecting copyright assignments from contributors to the
> > project? Or is the copyright on Subversion just going to be held by a
> > zillion different people?
>
> I think the overhead of collecting assignments is not worth it,
> especially considering that our copyright doesn't impose any
> significantly restrictive terms (so the benefit of defending it in
> court couldn't be very great).
>
> The impedance of getting someone to actually sign a form and
> physically send it back can be surprising (having had to do it for the
> FSF, I remember how much I procrastinated on this :-) ).
>
> Thoughts, Brian?
>
> [As an aside, for my personal projects, I'm beginning to think I might
> just release them to the public domain, with non-binding commentary
> describing my hope that the reader will preserve the same freedoms by
> releasing modified versions p.d. or under a free license. That
> sidesteps *all* legal issues, heh.]
>
> -K
>
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:23 2006