Re: Need to Identify Contributions and the Dissident Test
Scripsit Don Armstrong <don@debian.org>
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Henning Makholm wrote:
>> Scripsit Don Armstrong <don@debian.org>
>> below your copyright notice. In either case the author will need to
>> argue that even though he did write the code, the *licence* notice
>> was added fradulently afterwards by someone who did not hold the
>> copyright.
> In this circumstance, someone would be able to at least make an
> attempt to e-mail the author and ask if the license really was what
> the author says it was.
How will
Mike Smith changed this.
as opposed to
Call me Ishmael! I changed this.
help you email the author?
> If I was building a business or making a serious application that used
> this code, I would be able to do due dilligance and build upon this
> code. I wouldn't be able to (safely) do so if the code didn't have an
> identifiable author.
You might not be able to even if the code did have an identifiable
author. And if the license notice is fradulent, the name in the
copyright notice may just as easily be fradulent too.
> The question (for me anyway) is that whether or not allowing people to
> remain anonymous in their distributed contributions is worth the
> licensing and copyright uncertainty that having an unverifiable author
> entails. [Think of all the problems we have with non-anonymous authors
> who have dissapeared from the face of the planet...]
We have to cope with disappearing non-anonymous authors, yes. I don't
think coping with anonymous authors (who presumably have a good reason
to want to stay anonymous - or they'd have chosen to cash in their
free-software brownie points) significantly adds to that problem.
> I guess we could argue that this is sort of a weaker form of the FSF's
> policy of copyright assignment, and has a similar motivation that
> their policy does.
But the FSF does not require that anyone who distributes a
self-modified version assigns copyright. Indeed they *allow* me to
distribute my modified version without assigning copyright, even
though that prevents them from including my modifications in their
version (for as long as they stick to the copyright assignment
policy).
Again, the conditions for having stuff included upstream are
completely irrelevant for freedom.
--
Henning Makholm "Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit."
Reply to: