This is a stick up! Hand over your copyright!
Copyright assignment (the practice of asking contributors to a project to assign their copyright to the project owner) always makes me a bit uncomfortable.
From a business perspective, holding all of the copyright for your products provides important advantages (usually ones that relates to making money or managing risk).
From a normal human perspective, it sucks to ask someone to give up many of the rights to their own work.
Of course, copyright assignment isn't all bad. It is an essential part of how the Free Software Foundation protects its projects against unlicensed use.
When you have a robust copyright assignment process, you protect users of your software by helping to ensure that they don't get bad code. (Bad code, in this case, means code that someone contributed that they didn't have the rights to.)
Additionally, you are much more able to fix (or cause ;) problems with the licensing in the future.
So, getting back to eZ, we have been thinking about how we can have a better copyright assignment process. My friend Georg recommended that I check out the work that the Free Software Foundation Europe (with the help of a group of academics, hackers and lawyers) has done on the problem. They have created a copyright holder-friendly agreement called the Fiduciary License Agreement which makes the process a lot less sour.
The basics of the agreement are:
- The copyright holder transfers their copyright (or equivalent rights) on a given work (ie. a piece of code that they wrote) to the Free Software Foundation Europe.
- The Free Software Foundation Europe then re-transfers most of these rights back to the original copyright holder, minus the right to exclusively license the work to others.
Additionally, the Free Software Foundation Europe is bound to return all rights to the original author if they ever use the work in way inconsistent with the principles of Free Software.
I hope that we will be able to take a similar approach. While we won't agree to not use the work for proprietary software, I believe that we could commit to publicly releasing copies of the code under a GPL-compatible Free Software license, which helps meet our needs while respecting the rights of our contributors.
Of course, people are free to write and distribute their own modified versions of our software, as long as they comply with the licensing terms of the software in question. We only need copyright assignment when someone wants us to include their code in our distribution of one of our products.
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Posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 5:15
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February 16th, 2006 at 23:21
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