Re: [boost] Copyright-less licence references

Subject: Re: [boost] Copyright-less licence references
From: Raffi Enficiaud (raffi.enficiaud_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-09-15 15:48:52

Le 15/09/15 20:14, Andrey Semashev a écrit :
> On 15.09.2015 19:46, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
>> Rene Rivera <grafikrobot <at> gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>
>>> I suggest you stop this thread as it's not going to help anyone. The
>>> only
>>> way to answer these questions to any satisfaction is to retain legal
>>> counsel. Which is what we did to get the license and copyright
>>> guidelines
>>> we have now. If you want to change the guidelines it might be more
>>> beneficial to bring up the issues with the steering committee and the
>>> SFC.
>>>
>>
>> Well, I am bring it up. Steering committee is free to discuss, respond or
>> ignore. As it stands my source code either lying almost all the time, or
>> missing copyright or I need to keep updating 700+ file all the times.
>> Unless
>> this changes, I am inclined to change disclaimer everywhere to "Copyright
>> 2001 Boost.Test authors" and be done with that.
>
> I suppose, you could do that, if all current copyright holders agree to
> that in written form and the "Boost.Test authors" is either a list of
> persons documented somewhere and bundled with the library, or a legal
> body that owns the copyright. Otherwise I feel such a change would be
> illegal and not fair in a common sense.
>

Hi all,

This is exactly what I did. I sent an email to Gennadiy (written form) 
that says that I give up all my copy rights and transfer them to 
boost.test development team (or something similar).

 > In any case, I wouldn't advise such changes without consulting a lawyer.
 > Take note that authors live in different countries and Boost is an
 > international project, so you'll have to abide the international law.
 >

However, I find this thread far from being "unuseful", and since this is 
about open source and freedom, I would say that delegating the answer or 
the responsibility to a lawyer is not really an (affordable) option for 
most of us.

Here are some resources I found on the Internet, that seem to emanate 
from reasonably good/serious sources or ppl. Some might argue that only 
a lawyer might state or commit on those matters. This is just not true: 
as pointed out already, those copyright matters should be covered in 
every country in the same way, which I doubt would ever happen. Also we 
are fully in a gray area, so I do not expect some lawyer would ever 
commit onto this.

Now (short) the list:

- http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html#x1-110002.3
   from what I understand here, it is perfectly plausible to ask to 
contributors to give away their copyrights when they contribute to a 
project.

- 
http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html

   * DVCS is de facto an excellent tool for managing copyrights in case 
of competing claims, as the authorship in source file becomes difficult 
to track (authorship is copyright holder unless otherwise specified).

   * footnote 3/ copyright year, under the US law: "2) the year of the 
work’s first publication".

- http://producingoss.com/en/index.html
   case studies on big projects.

They are plenty resources on the Internet, sometimes giving 
contradictory information. It's also a pity that all those questions are 
not crystal clear for most of us. But it just tells me that no one nor 
organization is taking any commitment onto this, leaving the open source 
software developers with all the responsibilities.

Best,
Raffi