[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: GNU license and MBraille
- From: James Teh <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 09:30:25 +1000
On 14/01/2015 3:16 AM, John Gardner wrote:
This is the latest in a long discussion thread about LGPL. As one of the
present copyright holders,
This is my first major problem concerning liblouis copyright every time
it comes up. The major contributors have stated on several occasions
that there are three copyright holders. That is incorrect. Other minor
contributors (such as myself) never assigned copyright to anyone else,
so we are copyright holders as well, regardless of how small the
fraction is.
In the email that was sent out a while ago asking to switch to LGPL 2.1
(which I approve by the way), John Gardner wrote:
I am asking if you object to your contributions to the
liblouis/liblouisutdml/tables being included in the copyright of the three
copyright holders.
This suggests that there are already only three copyright holders,
which, as I explained above, is incorrect. If the text had said "major
copyright holders", that would have been fine. However, even then,
there's no legal document which explains the exact provisions of our
agreement. Is it enforced that the project will be kept open source? Do
we maintain copyright over our own code as well (dual copyright) or is
this total copyright assignment? Where is this pledge to assign
copyright to a new non-profit legally stated? You're asking us to
assign/grant copyright without any idea of the legal provisions.
For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of dual copyright and even less a
fan of copyright assignment, but I understand why it might be necessary;
there are reasons we'd prefer to have dual copyright of all NVDA code.
However, I refuse to grant this without some idea of what I'm actually
agreeing to.
You might consider creating an agreement using something like Harmony
Agreements (http://harmonyagreements.org/) as a base. At least then, we
know what we're signing.
Thanks,
Jamie
--
James Teh
Executive Director, NV Access Limited
Ph +61 7 3149 3306
www.nvaccess.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NVAccess
Twitter: @NVAccess
SIP: jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
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