On Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:59:32 +0000 Wols Lists wrote: [...] > On 15/01/12 20:07, Francesco Poli wrote: [...] > > As it should already be clear from my previous comments, I think > > that requiring blanket re-licensing permission from contributors as > > a prerequisite for accepting contributions to an activity of the > > Debian Project would be a *very bad* precedent. > > > > I think that such a strategy, if adopted, would alienate a number > > of existing or future potential contributors. > > I know I'm probably saying the same as Hugo in a different way, but > what about assigning the copyright, This has been criticized even more by a number of people (including me). Anyway, a different (and saner) strategy has already been adopted, luckily: http://bugs.debian.org/388141#311 > and accepting as payment an > agreement that the work will only be relicenced within certain > guidelines, eg saying that it must meet the 2012 DFSG for example. > > Should the project then use the copyright to unacceptably relicence > the work, they are in breach of contract, the copyright transfer can > be voided, and the relicence becomes a copyright violation. I don't think that this would work correctly. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that different people disagree on what meets the DFSG and what fails to meet them. Even among people with a good experience in analyzing licenses. Hence, the problem is: who is going to evaluate whether a given future re-licensing is compliant with the DFSG? SPI? The Debian Project? The FTP-masters? They are basically the ones who decide the re-licensing: they will always state (most probably in good faith!) that the decision complies with the agreement. The contributor who signed the copyright transfer agreement? This would open the possibility for a number of future complaints that could be hard to handle... > > That's the way the FSF do their copyright assigns, auiu. Actually, I strongly dislike this behavior of the FSF... -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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