Mailing-List: contact harmony-dev-help@incubator.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Received-SPF: unknown (asf.osuosl.org: error in processing during lookup of
 archie@dellroad.org)
Message-ID: <434BC3BA.5080902@dellroad.org>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 08:52:58 -0500
From: Archie Cobbs <archie@dellroad.org>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041129
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: [legal] Bulk contribution barrier to entry
References: <96F9F03B-12DD-4439-87A0-870195DEE8D9@apache.org>
 <434B7D77.3050505@cryptall.com>
In-Reply-To: <434B7D77.3050505@cryptall.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Dermot Dunnion wrote:
> It seems to me that you don't need the permission of every author, what 
> you need is permission of every copyright owner.

I could be wrong here, but typically I think you only need permission
of *any* copyright owner, not every one (although I'm sure you could
also structure things that way).

E.g., person A writes software X and therefore has copyright.
Person A donates X to Apache, and in the process assigns copyright
rights to the Apache project. Now Apache is free to distribute X
without getting explicit permission from A every time.

Same with the FSF. E.g., Classpath hackers must sign a document
granting the FSF copyright. This is so the FSF can be allowed to
distribute Classpath without getting explicit permission from
every author (which would be very unweildy). But the original
authors still are allowed to distribute their own work too,
even under a non-free license, if they want to.

Disclaimer: I ain't no lawyer :-)

-Archie

__________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs      *        CTO, Awarix        *      http://www.awarix.com