Some weeks ago Luke Kaines stated his observation that “requiring copyright attribution is a greater sin than providing commercial add-ons”.
His perspective was based on the theory that requiring copyright assignment restricts the developer community, a theory that was apparently repeated by Dave Neary during the recent OSBC event (I missed that session due to our CAOS client lunch).
Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree provided some evidence of Dave’s perspective and also the contrary view that the assignment of copyright is critical not just for vendor-dominated projects but also for community projects such as The Mozilla Foundation, The Apache Foundation and The Free Software Foundation.
Daniel referenced Eben Moglen and his explanation of why the FSF requests copyright assignment: “If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.”
Meanwhile I am also reminded of the presentation given by Lawrence Rosen during the Eclipse Open Source Strategy Summit when he discussed the fact that it would be almost impossible for the Linux kernel to relicensed from the GNU GPLv2.
For vendors that dominate their own projects, Daniel also notes the importance of being able to provide indemnification for customers.
Some time ago I discussed with Marten Mickos the potential for Sun to encourage contributions to MySQL by changing its rules on copyright assignment given the diminishing importance of commercial license version in MySQL’s revenue mix and Marten pointed out that the main reason Sun would continue to require assignment was not to be able to relicense but to be in a position to stand behind the code (although the MySQL project did adopt the more flexible Sun Contributor Agreement, as referenced in the comments below).
Which isn’t to say that copyright assignment is essential for every project, but it does demonstrate that the assignment of copyright isn’t intrinsically linked to a vendor-dominated development project.
Also worth reading on this topic is Andrew Lampitt’s recent update on the Open-Core licensing definition in which he proposes two variants based on whether the copyright is controlled by a vendor or community and lists some of the benefits and risks to the vendor, customer and community, or each approach.
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9 comments ↓
At OpenNMS we struggled with this until one of our OGP members pointed out Sun’s contributor agreement which introduces the concept of dual-copyright. This allows the copyright to all of the OpenNMS code to be held by one organization without taking anything away from the author. I pestered some folks I know at Sun until they actually put a license on their agreement (Creative Commons) at which point we promptly borrowed it. We view this as a win-win for everyone involved and it helps us to stay 100% open source.
Many thanks for posting the information about Sun’s contributor agreement.
Indeed it sounds like an excellent solution for many open source projects.
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You seem to pop back and forth between “copyright attribution” and “copyright assignment,” here. It seems to me these are very different things, with very different restrictions and very different implications, yet I think your implication is that they’re equivalent. If I’m reading you right, can you comment on why they seem equivalent to you?
Good point Jack, those were typos on my part (Luke Kaines mentioned attribution at the start of his post but was actually referring to assignment, which is what triggered my typos) and I have corrected them. I was referring to copyright *assignment*, which is very different to attribution as you point out
[…] 451 CAOS Theory » On the importance of copyright assignment Explaining the value of copyright attribution for open source projects. (tags: copyright opensourcebusiness) […]
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