Real-World Copyright Assignment

[Henningsen]

>> .............  If you submit code to a
>> project, you don't do it in expectation of future profits directly from the
>> code.  Likely unworkable and unenforcable.

Currently that is the rule no doubt, but I think we could get open source
code written faster and probably better if people could actually expect
getting paid for their work. In exchange for giving up his/her copyrights, a
contributor to my code who has written 10% of the code (counted by lines of
code, assuming that every contributing author writes entire file modules,
and small patches are disregarded) would get paid something like 5% of any
profits from commercial licenses. Commercial releases would always be ahead
of GPL- releases, and commercial releases would contain closed source
encryption and authentification code that allows users to play together over
a central server in an environment that allows the formation of trust
between participants. 

>Which brings the next thorny issue:  suppose a contributor does
>not want to assign his/her rights to you (perhaps thinking "what
>do I get out of this, or perhaps opposing it on principle).  What
>then?

He's not a contributor if he does not agree to assing the rights. I make
that clear at the start. As for forking, since I'm writing game code, that
is actually a good thing. It means another game gets written. I would not
like to see a proliferation of servers running the same virtual world that I
run, but such paid services obviously work much better with closed source
code, where it is much harder (both technically and legally) to cheat. And
nobody can combine our code with closed source encryption code but
ourselves. So while we release code under the GPL, we are the only ones who
can offer no-cheat networked use of the code.

Peter Henningsen
alifegames.com