Real-World Copyright Assignment

[Greg Herlein]

> I will only integrate contributor's code into my codebase if they hand over
> copyright to alifegames.com (in exchange for a fair share of any profits
> that may derive from commercial licenses to the code in the future), so I
> will be able to release my own core code at any time under any license I
> wish.

<snip>

>>At Sun, we license OpenOffice.org code under both the LGPL and SISSL.
>>Since only the copyright holder can change licensing terms for a body

It seems that others think like the FSF:  getting code
contributors to assign copyrights to contributed code is a good
thing.

However, I'm very interested in the actual real-world
implementation of this. What kind of language do you use in the
copyright assignement agreement?  Is there a template that cn be
copied by others?  Do you require hard copy signed and
snail-mailed to consider it legal?  Do you apply this to all
contributions?  Obviously a major feature implmentation would 
need it, but what about a three line patch?  Where is the cutoff
from a practical consideration?

As to contributing back profits from the effort to the original
contributors, how do you calculate the share?  How can you track that?

I'm considering all these issues for a release of some code I have,
and it's thorny with problems.  

I'd be very interested in a more rigourous discussion of this - on or
off the list.

I'm also interested in what constitutes "distribution" - if someone
takes GPL code and embeds it into a network appliance and sells that
product as a black box and the user never even knows what happens
under the hood, is that considered "distribution?"  How can a
develper enforce it if they want to license the code so that "if
you are free, my code is free; if you are commercial, my code is
commercial?"

Greg

(my apologies if this stuff has been covered recently - I just found
this list and I cannot find any archives of it to review).