Greg A. Woods wrote:
>  Unfortunately I don't see that the standard BSD
> copyright has made a strong enough philosophical statement to encourage
> developers to use it uniformly and without modification.

Isn't it even worse? I can't use "the BSD license" without modification,
as I neither am UCB or can speak for them - so at least I must alter
the name. Which gives a completely new license - so what does this buy
us? (Not even considering, as Greg pointed out, that the exact terms
of that license don't fit very well to authors under foreign copyright
law (like myself)).

So the only way to keep it simple is to require *without exceptions* all
stuff to be assigned to TNF.

If we do allow exceptions, then there should be some way to handle this
for distributors - and I thing TNF should suggest a way to handle it or 
even provide an up to date /etc/LICENSES (or whatever).

And if there are exceptions I think it's at least impolite to discuss 
if a concrete case is worth the exception or should be redone. Reinventing
the wheel is never a solution, even if it's not hard work. We are short
of contributors and shouldn't waste resources.

The concrete case could come up in the first place because there doesn't
seem to be tough rule yet: neither were assignement of copyright to TNF
required, nor was there a way to handle the licensing mess. The actual
question, as I understood it, is: do we accept this driver and use it
as a trigger to do the long missing licensing work, or do we keep our
eyes closed, ignore the licensing problem and redo that driver.

Obviously, in this case not creating an acceptable way to handle the 
licensing stuff is the easier way - but IMHO the answer to another
question.

A related, but completely different point: does anyone know if and how it's
possible for a non-US author to assign copyright to TNF? I'm not a lawyer but
I don't see anything like "copyright assignement" to a third party in german
"copyright" law, only exception is work done under contract for an employer
or client, where that contract explicitly states who's intellectual property
the resulting work should be. Without such a contract (signed before the work
is done) I think the intellectual property can not be transfered, only the
right to use (and/or make money from it).

Yet another point: how is it done by an US based author? Does he get some
paperwork from TNF? Does he just put in their copyright notice, without TNF
even knowing about it?

Contributors should know this before they start working...


Martin