groupware for Fedora

[Erwin Rol]

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 19:18 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 15:13 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 18:04 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 11:54 +0200, Erwin Rol wrote:
> > 
> > > > With some seriously ugly hacks i got it to compile and run, of course
> > > > still a lot of bugs but when it would be a real community project (no
> > > > copyright assignments, and no CC-non-commercial license) I think it can
> > > > be made to work with gcj.
> > > 
> > > Many community projects including all of the GNU ones require copyright
> > > assignments. That is on many occasions a good practice. 
> > 
> > And it is also a PITA to do paperwork before you can help with a
> > project. This about if everybody that helps with Fedora has to sign
> > legal paperwork, which of course is different in every country. Of
> > course if you want to sell the GPL work of others under a closed source
> > license like MySQl, Qt, Open-Xchange, than you need to be the copyright
> > holder. So the main thing copyright assignment does is turn GPL code
> > into BSD-like code (be it for a smaller group, the ones the copyrights
> > are assigned to). A true community project has no need for copyright
> > assignment.
> 
> Incorrect. Any project (not just those dual licensed) would be benefit
> from a better legal stand point by retaining the copyright over all
> contributions 
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
> http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt

You can also look at it this way, a country is way easier to control by
a dictator than by some pesky parliament that always disagree with each
other. But still most people would rather not have a dictator in their
country. If people can not agree what to do about a copyright violation
of a common piece of software, maybe that's how it should be, maybe
creating a "dictator" by assigning all copyright to "him" is not always
in the best interest of the community. 

Of course the FSF is "always" doing the "right" thing, so assigning
copyright to them is probably not a problem. But what good is it for the
community to assign copyright to some company like the one making
Open-Xchange, MySql, Qt etc. ?  

- Erwin