OVPL vote results

[Rishab Aiyer Ghosh]

i should point out that projects that ask for copyright assignment from 
contributors (not limited to companies; apache and FSF - for GNU - do this
too) do not use the licence as a mechanism to force this. nothing in the
licence stops me from releasing the rishab-sql distribution of, say, mysql,
with copyright over my contributions and mysql copyright over the original
contributions. copyright assignment requirements only work as long as the 
original author is seen as a trusted steward of the code; nothing in the 
licence prevents anyone else from "the community" from forking their own
derived work without copyright assignment, e.g. in case the company stops
distributing future versions as open source.

a grant-back clause in the _licence_, however, forces code (if not copyright)
grant back to the original copyright holder.

-rishab

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 11:54:33AM +1100, David Ryan wrote:
> the board is that large companies with open source products demand more 
> than the OVPL.  To contribute to these large projects you must sign a 
> copyright assignment of some kind.  If you take the OSI boards current 
> view, these large projects demand "descrimination" for contributions.  
> While it is possible that a third party can distribute modifications, 
> they never have the full copyright ownership to have the same rights as 
> the initial developer.  In this way the "descrimination" is complete and 
> total over the community.  These companies are totally in their right to 
> completely remove these projects from open source leaving nothing to the 
> community of contributors.