On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote: > Rich Freeman wrote: >> >> The only things devs need to do with respect to copyright is follow >> the law > > Ah, but which law? I understand that law in e.g. Germany does not > permit non-natural persons to own copyright. The public domain > concept is also not recognized world-wide. > > So a German citizen who wants to contribute an ebuild now has a > significant legal questionmark on their hands, when actually they > just want to publish an ebuild.
We don't ask every Gentoo developer to independently formulate a copyright policy. They just have to follow the policy. Gentoo developers do not need to worry about whether copyright assignment exists in Germany. They just have to stick "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" at the top of their ebuilds. Whether that policy makes sense is a different matter, which is why there is a desire to improve the policy. Gentoo devs are not required to participate in these discussions, but they will be required to follow a new policy if it is enacted. > >> and ensure that ebuilds have the correct copyright notice. > > Define correct... ;) # Copyright yyyy-yyyy Gentoo Foundation # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 That is the current policy, and is correct by definition. Of course, we want to improve on this. However, all a dev needs to know today is to do it this way. > > I think Gentoo's policy of requiring copyright assignment would be > better replaced with a policy of requiring a (ideally specific) very > permissive license, something like MIT or BSD-2. > That is part of my draft proposal, though it doesn't specify which license we'd use. > >> Gentoo is very careful to comply with copyright law > > Sure. Being governed by US law is a whole different topic. > We endeavor to follow the law everywhere. Whether the current policy does so is a different topic indeed. :) I'm not saying that things are perfect. I'm just saying that Gentoo devs don't have to understand copyright law everywhere on the planet to comply. Our current policies are fairly simple. They might or might not be too simple, but the concern I was replying to was just the concern that understanding copyright policy is a burden on new developers. The current policy is very simple and shouldn't really be a burden to understand. -- Rich
