Message: 10 Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 15:40:58 +0000 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] License exceptions in Wikimedia's repo (was       Re: SVN Extension Access) To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID:       CAJ0tu1EepsqjT41rRYY9gnkCVJ-BZ-6oe-oUgy3nt1XVtFFSrQ@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On 7 November 2011 15:08, Olivier Beaton olivier.beaton@gmail.com wrote:

...

To make it clear, copyright assignments (what I had in my original request) are common in the FOSS community, as you pointed out you talked about them yourself on your blog and wmf talked about having

Copyright assignments are inherently harmful, as their only use is so that the assigned-to body can defect on the implicit covenant of open source: that is, so it can take people's contributions private.

The FSF continues to use them, on the theory that this gives greater legal protection. While the FSF is quite unlikely to defect (it's spent twenty-five years behaving as a consistent actor), its legal theory appears unnecessary (neither the Linux kernel nor BusyBox use copyright assignments, but both have been spectacularly successful in pursuing GPL violations) and its continued use makes people think they're a good idea.

For an example of defection, see Oracle taking MySQL open-core.

Copyright assignments are harmful. They are not some sort of standard thing in open source. They would be harmful to MediaWiki.

• d.

You don't need to go for ideological reasons to go against copyright assignments to individual extension authors. It's simply impractical in the MW repo where many people make batch maintenance commits to expect all of those people to assign you their copyright (imho).

My understanding is we allow people to commit extensions under whatever OSI approved license strikes their fancy, and that if you commit to someone else's extension, then you also release your commit under that license. This always struck me as common sense...

-bawolff