Le 15/09/15 20:14, Andrey Semashev a écrit :
On 15.09.2015 19:46, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
Rene Rivera
writes: I suggest you stop this thread as it's not going to help anyone. The only way to answer these questions to any satisfaction is to retain legal counsel. Which is what we did to get the license and copyright guidelines we have now. If you want to change the guidelines it might be more beneficial to bring up the issues with the steering committee and the SFC.
Well, I am bring it up. Steering committee is free to discuss, respond or ignore. As it stands my source code either lying almost all the time, or missing copyright or I need to keep updating 700+ file all the times. Unless this changes, I am inclined to change disclaimer everywhere to "Copyright 2001 Boost.Test authors" and be done with that.
I suppose, you could do that, if all current copyright holders agree to that in written form and the "Boost.Test authors" is either a list of persons documented somewhere and bundled with the library, or a legal body that owns the copyright. Otherwise I feel such a change would be illegal and not fair in a common sense.
Hi all, This is exactly what I did. I sent an email to Gennadiy (written form) that says that I give up all my copy rights and transfer them to boost.test development team (or something similar).
In any case, I wouldn't advise such changes without consulting a lawyer. Take note that authors live in different countries and Boost is an international project, so you'll have to abide the international law.
However, I find this thread far from being "unuseful", and since this is about open source and freedom, I would say that delegating the answer or the responsibility to a lawyer is not really an (affordable) option for most of us. Here are some resources I found on the Internet, that seem to emanate from reasonably good/serious sources or ppl. Some might argue that only a lawyer might state or commit on those matters. This is just not true: as pointed out already, those copyright matters should be covered in every country in the same way, which I doubt would ever happen. Also we are fully in a gray area, so I do not expect some lawyer would ever commit onto this. Now (short) the list: - http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html#x1-110002.3 from what I understand here, it is perfectly plausible to ask to contributors to give away their copyrights when they contribute to a project. - http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html * DVCS is de facto an excellent tool for managing copyrights in case of competing claims, as the authorship in source file becomes difficult to track (authorship is copyright holder unless otherwise specified). * footnote 3/ copyright year, under the US law: "2) the year of the work’s first publication". - http://producingoss.com/en/index.html case studies on big projects. They are plenty resources on the Internet, sometimes giving contradictory information. It's also a pity that all those questions are not crystal clear for most of us. But it just tells me that no one nor organization is taking any commitment onto this, leaving the open source software developers with all the responsibilities. Best, Raffi