public inbox for ecos-announce@sourceware.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* A temporary change of eCos copyright assignments
@ 2003-12-05 16:01 Alex Schuilenburg
  0 siblings, 0 replies; only message in thread
From: Alex Schuilenburg @ 2003-12-05 16:01 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ecos-announce

As you may be aware, the copyright of the eCos source base is mostly
owned by Red Hat with portions owned by the individual maintainers. The
eCos maintainers have also elected that the copyright of future
significant contributions to eCos should be assigned to the FSF (Free
Software Foundation) instead of Red Hat. This will help ensure legal
protection for eCos and its users and well as protecting the future of eCos.

Unfortunately the FSF are currently unable to accept copyright
assignments for eCos, although they have confirmed their willingness to
do so, and there has been some dissatisfaction with the current
arrangements with assigning to Red Hat. The discussions with the FSF
have been taking longer than anticipated, and there have been a number
of occasions where assignments have not been handled as promptly as the
maintainers would have hoped. This has resulted in unnecessary delays to
the inclusion of eCos contributions in the standard eCos source base and
CVS tree. As a result, to encourage the efficient processing of
contributions we, eCosCentric, are prepared to process and administer
eCos copyright assignments until the FSF are able to fully assume the role.

Unfortunately, eCosCentric may not legally accept eCos copyright
assignments on behalf of the FSF. Instead, we are willing to accept
copyright assignments of code and documentation copyright for new
contributions and have pledged to reassign copyright of that same code
to the FSF when the FSF begins accepting eCos copyright assignments. It
is eCosCentric's intention to also assign copyright of our own future
public contributions to eCos to the FSF.

This email therefore provides a public commitment by eCosCentric to
reassign to the FSF the copyright of code that has been assigned to
eCosCentric by eCos contributors under this scheme. eCosCentric promises
that it will not abuse the copyright assigned to it by relicensing it
under different terms. All assigned code will only be distributed by
eCosCentric under the eCos license (or in the case of files contributed
under a difference license, such as certain BSD licensed files, the
license which that file declares itself to be under). eCosCentric seeks
to derive no commercial benefit whatsoever from having these assignments
made to them.

For additional information, please see this FAQ:
   http://ecos.sourceware.org/ecoscentric-assignment.html

-- Alex Schuilenburg

Managing Director / CEO                           eCosCentric Limited
http://www.ecoscentric.com/              The eCos and RedBoot experts


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] only message in thread

only message in thread, other threads:[~2003-12-05 16:01 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: (only message) (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2003-12-05 16:01 A temporary change of eCos copyright assignments Alex Schuilenburg

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).