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Evolution Bounty Stirs GPL Concerns
Moochman writes "The recent Desktop Integration Bounty (funded by Novell) will surely please people who want Evolution to be part of GNOME. But the Ximian Evolution copyright assignment has stirred up concerns in the community about whether contributors will be able to maintain their Free Software mores. Essentially, contributors to Evolution must give Novell copyright over any code they submit; then Novell is allowed to include this code in a proprietary product. Is this a smart business move, or a violation of the GPL?" Since all contributions are only at the request of the contributing coder, and considering that the copyright assignment form says that "Ximian agrees to grant back to Developer, and does hereby grant, nonexclusive, royaltyfree and noncancelable rights to use the Works," and specifies that Novell/Ximian release the code under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (such as the GPL), it seems to protect the contributors rather well.
Developers are getting paid for their work. Essentially they are contract workers for Novell.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Another big one is GNU.
So does my project.
;-)
As I mentioned on the linked page: "Also, the FSF makes all contributors attribute copyrights to the FSF. They do this for legal reasons. Mozilla did not, and when they decided to re-license, they had to contact every contributor. Because of this, we too require that any contributors attribute the copyrights to the jasabe project. Of course, you are still free to fork the project and keep your changes under your copyright, but we cannot accept your changes into the main jasabe tree."
Don't believe me? More info can be found on the FSF page as well as on their FAQ.
Not that it matters much for our project. It's only important if you have contributors.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Novell (or any other copyright owner for that matter) owns the copyright, which is what allows them to decide which license to release a product under. However, if you obtain a GPLed product from a copyright owner, they have granted you the rights laid out in the GPL, such as the right to freely redistribute, and the right to make modifications (provided said mods are released GPL as well). That license cannot be retroactively cancelled. All that Novell could do is refuse to release all future versions of Evo under the GPL. At which point the GPLed version of Evo would probably fork into a separate project. That's the beauty of GPLed code - once it's out there, it's out there. Doesn't matter if the company producing the code goes belly-up, or decides to stop providing updates, or whatever. The code is still there, and can still be worked with.
Notice that copyright assignment to Evolution has
been the rule since its beginning, there is nothing
new.
So this is a three to four year old policy.
Miguel.
Before you make comments like this, please read
the copyright assignment form, which clearly
states that Novell agrees to grant back to the
developer all the rights over the code that they
contributed.
So you can effectively do whatever you want with
your code (unless it is a derivative works, in
which case, you are subject to the GPL anyways).
Miguel.
The policy -like stated elsewhere- is one that
Ximian came up with, since the very first launch
of Evolution.
People are just mixing two different things,
because both were discussed this week on the
list.
There is no change in policy, just someone who
freaked out this week because of Sun's rumours,
the freakout evolving into this.
Miguel.