Brett Glass wrote:
At 04:26 AM 2/14/2002, Roger Fujii wrote:
This scheme would make the license awkward, because you have to add in "oh, by the way, all the contributions you make will be given to winecorp with an unrestricted license" clause. It is far cleaner and simpler to require contributions to assign the copyright. OpenOffice does this.
The danger of this approach is that EVERYONE -- even contributors -- must go to the organization that owns the copyright and ask, "Mother, may I?" before doing things with the code.
well, I think the assumption here was that winecorp would always release an lgped (or whatever viral license) version of the tree, so that 'normal' use would not be inhibited. I suppose there is a small window between submission/transfer of copyright and the publication into the tree where the maintainer/licensor may go insane and to something silly, but that scenario would definitely fall under "done in bad faith".
Commercial entities will have no guarantee that they'll be allowed to use even their own contributions -- especially if their competitors are part of the body that grants permissions. Politics can also rear their head, with favoritism toward specific vendors.
you do have a point - given that this licensing issue started up again because of what appears to be competitive/political reasons, I guess one shouldn't ignore the possible influence it might have in the future.
-r