[License-discuss] GDPR and code authors...

[Alex Rousskov]

On 08/14/2018 06:39 AM, Antoine Thomas wrote:

> A famous cartoon about coders and development is joking today about the
> right for coders to delete their personal data in a project, because of
> GDPR in Europe. For an open source project, it would mean to have to
> create an "anonymous" coder to transfer contributions.

GDPR rights are no absolute -- there are many reasonable exclusions. In
most cases, code contribution metadata would fall under one or more of
those exclusions IMHO.

And most code submissions (rather than their metadata) are not covered
by GDPR at all. Thus, there should be virtually no GDPR-driven copyright
transfers.


> This lead to a few questions:
>  - Is this technically possible with GIT?

Technically, everything is possible with git ;-). However, altering
project history creates serious technical and non-technical problems,
especially for projects with many distributed independent developers and
for automation. This is one of the reasons I hope that GDPR exclusions
would apply.


>  - What kind of IP and license issues could this generate? For project
> owners ? For users and service companies?

Virtually none, I hope. GDPR should not affect code ownership in most
cases, and virtually all exceptional situations where serious problems
could arise should fall under GDPR exceptions.


> I hope this will stay a joke, or that this is not a serious threat.

One of the older open source projects I work on does get a constant
trickle of removal requests. So far, they were mostly about mailing list
postings rather than code submissions. I am sure there will be
code-related metadata removal requests as well, so this is not just a
joke. However, I hope that GDPR exceptions provide a reasonable defense
against unreasonable demands to rewrite DVCS (e.g., git) history.

IANAL. TINLA.

Alex.