[beyond-licensing] Legal topics that FOSS projects could use more information on

[Brian Behlendorf]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On 06/15/2016 08:15 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 05:06:38AM -0700, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>>> Is it right to call it "dangers" when there are both pros and cons?
>>> For example, it's one of the only tools we have to help retire old
>>> licenses, or encourage greater license compatibility (for example,
>>> when Mozilla went triple-licensed with GPL, LGPL, and MPL).
>
> Mozilla did not use anything that could be called 'copyright
> accumulation' - the tri-license was just one particular open source
> license policy.

I don't claim to have all the data here, then; how did it have the right 
to relicense code contributed by others before that point?  Is 
"accumulation" acquiring full copyright control to the code, or merely the 
right to relicense?

>> You're highlighting the pros, while my subconscious was highlighting the
>> cons :-)
>>
>> But that's kinda prove the point. We need resources explaining this
>> stuff to developers, because it's tricky and at the same time often gets
>> decided early on in the lifetime of a project.
>
> Is the suggestion that explaining this stuff to developers requires us
> to take a neutral position on everything (thus pointing out pros and
> cons)? If so I don't even see the point of this group -- there are pros
> and cons to everything involving legal and governance issues in open source.

No, but if there's a desire to reflect a consensus of this group on what 
to recommend, we may not have consensus that accumulation (which I assumed 
was meant as the right to relicense) is a bad thing.  Licenses have life 
cycles too, sometimes shorter than code, and the ability to relicense 
(more gracefully than just the GPL's "any future versions" term) has 
sometimes been a good thing (it seems) in our community.

We may be able to agree that trying to get copyright assignment is a 
deprecated practice, if we can do away with the presumption that 
assignment is practically necessary for enforcement.

I did mention trademarks and patents before, because if we're making 
recommendations around copyright and CLAs/DCOs, we shouldn't ignore those 
two.

Brian