[ On Tuesday, March 9, 1999 at 07:45:33 (+0100), Martin Husemann wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: NetBSD Copyright
>
> 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)).

Well, I didn't mean to that level of "without modification" -- I just
meant without modifying the meaning of the terms.  The GPL v2.0 is
somewhat more amenable to being referenced as the governing copyright
license, though strictly speaking it too requires that all the
appropriate blanks be filled in with the author's name, the year, etc.

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

That's what I'm saying is unlikely to happen.  Sure it would "keep
things simple", relatively speaking, but there's no great philisophical
or political "cause" behind TNF with which to entice developers such as
myself (at least not "great" to the extent the cause behind FSF is).

I'm not specifically opposed to assigning copyright.  I've done the
physical paperwork to assign specific submissions to FSF for things like
patches to GNU Emacs, but at least then I'm expecting the FSF to uphold
their copyright and protect my code from ever becoming proprietary.
[[So far as I know this assignment was legal even though I'm Canadian
and the FSF is in the USA.]]

For code assigned to TNF there's not as much protection -- the UCB
copyright (and those like it) is nowhere near as strong, legally, as the
GPL seemingly is and it specifically doesn't indend to prevent
subsequent users from making proprietary use of such code.  TNF also
hasn't explicitly stated (to the best of my limited knowledge) that
they'll actively pursue copyright violations.

I.e. I personally don't "believe" strongly enough in NetBSD to give away
my rights to TNF, especially when what I give away can be used in a
proprietary manner by anyone afterwards.  At least I wouldn't want to
give away rights for any "significant" contribution, such as a complete
program, device driver, or what have you.  So far I have implicitly
expected that patches I submit will be assigned to the copyright owner
of the file(s) they change (though I expect that to be properly legal
such assignment does require physical paperwork, at least in the USA,
since otherwise such patches create a derivative work and at least in
Canada the patch author would implicitly own the copyright on such a
derivative work).  I suppose it might be "easier" for everyone if
patches were explicitly assigned to the public domain.  In fact if I
really wanted to give anything significant away I'd give it away to
*everyone*, not just TNF or FSF or whomever, I'd assign it to the public
domain.

Not only that, but I suspect that any attempt to be strictly legal, be
it requiring full assignment or not, would drag an enterprise such as
TNF almost into the ground and would likely dry up significant sources
of contributions and slow project progress to a crawl.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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