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

Mike Dolan email at michaeldolan.com
Wed Jun 15 18:19:09 UTC 2016


Copyright aggregation without limiting the community's ability to fork
under the existing license is innocuous to me and in certain cases could
solve long term problems I don't believe many pay attention to. E.g. look
at any core project that is decades old that has some crufty underpinning
with odd licenses they can't get away from (e.g. scan OpenSSL).
Particularly on the death of key copyright owners, the aggregation of
copyright is an interesting path forward for the community to be able to
continue evolving its own future. I get that it can be abused by some bad
actors and I have a list of projects/companies I could cite but won't.
However, it could also be a helpful tool in certain circumstances. In
conjunction with Richard's point that most relicensing happens by agreement
of the past authors/copyright owners anyway, the ability to secure
agreement from the copyright owners/authors that the future community will
make the right choice after they've passed away would remove a key issue
that comes up in most relicensing discussions. Try tracking down the will
of a dead author to a project to see who inherited their copyrights in an
open source project...

I'm not sure how this relates to what this group is working on though. IMO,
licensing is a decision owned by the copyright owners involved now and in
the future. I'm certain that not every developer agrees with the FSF's CLA
requirements, but does that mean anyone would say a particular FSF project
is not "open source" in addition to being "free software"? The FSF has a
reason for requiring copyright assignment (
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html) and given their purpose, I
can't see how anyone could call their aggregation a "con" or "not open
source". Back to my first point, so long as the community can fork under
the current license, should anyone care?


On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 11:29 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana at opensource.org>
wrote:

> On 06/15/2016 11:20 AM, Danese Cooper wrote:
>
> > Surely there is no upside in initiating copyright aggregation for
> contributions submitted after the majority of the code has been written?
>
> I think there is an upside, since until that happens you don't know if
> it ever will happen - I would assert that the vast majority of open
> source projects do not relicense during their active lifetime. So until
> that possibly-nonexistent future event the project arguably benefits
> from the absence of copyright aggregation.
>
> There may be less of an upside if you think there is a high likelihood
> that some project will experience such a future copyright
> aggregation-requiring event.
>
> ("Initiating copyright aggregation" may be the wrong concept here -- I
> believe what would be more typical, not that these things happen very
> often, is that a relicensing effort would involve getting past
> contributors to agree to the new license, rather than granting a broad
> license or assigning copyright to whatever entity was managing legal
> matters for the project.)
>
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