Re: [ECOS] Re: eCosCentric copyright hold in headers

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

[ Moved to maintainers list ]

Alex Schuilenburg wrote:
> Andrew Lunn wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> Yep. It should all get blasted away when the FSF assignment happens 
>>> (don't ask).
>>
>>
>> Which is my i asked. We should keep track of this just in case...
> 
> 
> and for the benefit of all...
> 
> When I asked them face-to-face last week at ESCW, Red Hat were unable to 
> provide a date when the actual assignment to the FSF would happen. 
> Apparently everything has passed through legal and it is now a matter of 
> waiting for their engineer to become available to actually make the 
> assignment and header changes.
> 
> We could offer to do the changes for them but would need legal-sign off 
> from someone in Red Hat for all the files that would have their 
> copyright changed.  If we are going to help make this happen, I suggest 
> we provide Red Hat with a list of all the eCos files for which they hold 
> copyright and have them approve the list (in writing).  We can then make 
> the copyright changes and assignments to the FSF (including eCosCentric 
> and other maintainer held copyrights) in one go, which would make a lot 
> of sense.

I'd have hoped we wouldn't have to be responsible for that. While we could 
search for the copyright banner in files, I can't guarantee every file 
contains a Red Hat copyright that should have (even from the days when 
we^H^HRed Hat were working on eCos). And for the files without a Red Hat 
copyright banner, it would need careful identification to work out whether 
they are Red Hat's or someone elses (or indeed are mostly someone elses but 
may contain portions of RH code thus making it a derived work). The 
consequences of us making a mistake with the identification is painful; but 
if Red Hat makes the mistake it's nowhere near as bad and I believe intent 
does matter a lot in these circumstances.

It would be much much nicer if Red Hat could arrange some sort of blanket 
assignment, perhaps just by reference to the contents of the entire eCos 
CVS repository at ecos.sourceware.org. Or perhaps just list every 
repository file, irrespective of copyright and finetune the wording of the 
assignment so that it assigns any right and title that _may_ belong to Red 
Hat in the listed files. I'm no lawyer though.  I'd be more than willing to 
talk to them about ways it could be done though..... if they'll talk to me!

Jifl
-- 
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine