Message: 10
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 15:40:58 +0000
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] License exceptions in Wikimedia's repo (was
Re: SVN Extension Access)
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
<CAJ0tu1EepsqjT41rRYY9gnkCVJ-BZ-6oe-oUgy3nt1XVtFFSrQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
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On 7 November 2011 15:08, Olivier Beaton <olivier.beaton(a)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