Re: Assignment query

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@jifvik.org>]

Rutger Hofman wrote:
> Good afternoon,
> 
> I would like to feed a patch back to eCos. I doubt it is small enough to 
> go without a copyright assignment form, so I contacted our officials. 
> Their reaction is, that they are in principle willing to assign the 
> copyright to eCos, but they prefer to change the second paragraph of the 
> Assignment from:
> 
> "<INSERT COMPANY NAME> affirms that it has no other intellectual 
> property interest that would undermine this release, or the use of eCos, 
> and will do nothing to undermine it in the future."
> 
> into:
> 
> "<INSERT COMPANY NAME> affirms that it will not assert any of its
> Intellectual property in a way that would undermine this release, or the
> use of eCos."
> 
> Would this be OK with eCos?

I have discussed this with people, and thought about it myself a bit, and I 
don't feel comfortable with the suggested wording as it stands. At a 
minimum it would require the substitution to really be:

"<INSERT COMPANY NAME> affirms that it will not assert any of its
intellectual property in a way that would undermine this release, or the
use of eCos; and will not do so now nor in the future."

But I think I would prefer some understanding of what the reasoning is. Not 
least because this wording would only cover a single assignment, and the 
company would have to sign further disclaimers for further assignments. 
This isn't our preferred practice, although it's not mandatory. Maybe 
explicit assignments each time are a preferred course of action for your 
company anyway. If you would prefer to mail me directly, if there are 
matters that can only be disclosed in confidence, that's fine (the 
ecos-maintainers list is a closed list but publically archived).

Jifl
-- 
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine