On Tue Jan 13 16:12:04 2004, Daniel Harris wrote:
On Dec 20, 2003, at 1:54 pm, Kirit Saelensminde wrote:I'm happy that to be incorporated into Kendra I would license that code to Kendra to license on with whatever license Kendra uses (or I wouldn't have given it), but I will not assign copyright to Kendra to then license on.This looks good. Would you agree to signing the following?: ---- I, the developer, hereby license my code to Kendra Foundation, in perpetuity, at no fee, allowing for the code to be incorporated into the Kendra Project so long as: 1. The code is licensed under a license or licenses containing a recursive disclaimer clause. ----
Seems a little bizarre. Only the copyright holder *needs* to license, as I understand things. Take the GPL as an example: Supposing I took part in a GPL-ed KF project.I contribute some code - I'm the copyright holder of that code, and I can therefore choose the license. Technically, I have to officially state that I'm licensing it under the GPL to KF.
KF accepts this, and incorporates it into their distribution. KF can redistribute it, *not* because they are licensing it, but because I have granted them a license which permits their redistribution of my copyright-protected work.
The whole KF work is a derivative work, licensed by KF, and those parts that KF do not own the copyright to are licensed tothem in such a way that they may redistribute it.
Now if Kirit then takes the KF work, he can redistribute it, or create a derived work and redistribute that, *not* because he has any interest in the copyright, but because KF and the other copyright holders have granted him a license to do so.
The Linux kernel works like this - Linus Torvalds owns the copyright of the work as a whole, but each contribution has copyright owned by whoever contributed it.
The alternative is to work via assignments, like the FSF do.They require the developer to formally assign their copyright over to the FSF, who could, in principle, license the resulting work under any license they choose. In return for this, the FSF grant the previous copyright holder effectively unlimited rights over the code.
The problem for KF here is that the FSF can only do this because people trust the FSF to operate in their interests. Not everyone does trust the FSF - Linus Torvalds doesn't, for instance, which is why the Linux kernel doesn't work this way, and also why the usual "or any later version" is absent from the license clause.
Dave.