Re: Future code ownership

[Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>]

On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 02:26, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > 6) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a US not-for-profit 
> > organisation. <http://www.spi-inc.org/> Its goals are to advance open 
> > source. They are well known already as the copyright holders of many well 
> > known projects like Debian Linux, GNOME, LSB as well as owners of the Open 
> > Source marque, and so on. They are trusted.  We have already taken the 
> > step of asking them in principle if they could accept eCos as a project, 
> > even with our funky licensing proposal outlined above. And as you can see 
> > from 
> > <http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/resolution-2002-10-08.mgs> 
> > this was accepted.
> > 
> > Personally I favour this option. I think it is best for eCos as an Open 
> > Source project, and I would like to hope even Red Hat would be able to 
> > support it, as it would be in the long-term best interests of eCos. 
> > Besides if the licensing proposal does pay off, they would profit!
> 
> Has the opinion of RH been sought on this? 
> 
> To me, this does seem like the best option.
> 

Frankly, Red Hat's opinion should not matter.  They're the ones
that caused all this ruckus in the first place.

As for me, I think this is the best solution.  My main reason
for putting my copyright in files I touch (which I believe matches 
those who followed me) was to preclude Red Hat from simply taking
work that I and others had done and selling it to the highest
bidder.  [n.b. of course the can still try to do this, but I'm
sure that some lawyer somewhere will stop them]  I would have
no problem assigning any new work I contribute to a third party
since this would have the same effect.

As Andrew has asked, how would we actually make such a change?
We can't change Red Hat's copyright notices without their consent.
Or can we get away with just assigning any new work to the SPI?

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |
MLB Associates              |  Consulting for the
+1 (970) 229-1963           |    Embedded world
http://www.mlbassoc.com/    |
email: <gary@mlbassoc.com>  |
gpg: http://www.chez-thomas.org/gary/gpg_key.asc
------------------------------------------------------------