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

[Danese Cooper]

> On Jun 15, 2016, at 7:23 AM, Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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?

Because Mozilla doesn't aggregate copyrights they were forced to assemble majority agreement before relicensing. It took more than 2 years. I know about this because Sun was the last major contributor to sign the agreement.

> 
>>> 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
> 
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