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12/08/2005: "ESR doesn't understand Copyright law"

In his latest, ESR shows that he doesn't understand copyright law.

His article does inadvertently illustrate an important point, however. If you make legal paperwork a requirement before volunteers can contribute to a project, very few will do so. If OpenOffice is failing its promise, it’s not because “many eyeballs” doesn’t work — it’s because bureaucratic obstacles are driving the eyeballs away.

Yet Open Office carefully explains its reasons for requiring an assignment, and all the Open Office Joint Copyright Assignment says is:

1. Contributor owns, and has sufficient rights to contribute, all source code and related
material intended to be compiled or integrated with the source code for the
OpenOffice.org open source product (the "Contribution") which Contributor has ever
delivered, and Sun has accepted, for incorporation into the technology made available
under the OpenOffice.org open source project.
2. Contributor hereby assigns to Sun joint ownership in all worldwide common law and
statutory rights associated with the copyrights, copyright application, copyright
registration and moral rights in the Contribution to the extent allowable under applicable
local laws and copyright conventions. Contributor agrees that this assignment may be
submitted by Sun to register a copyright in the Contribution. Contributor retains the right
to use the Contribution for Contributor's own purposes. This Joint Copyright Assignment
supersedes and replaces all prior copyright assignments made by Contributor to Sun
under the OpenOffice.org project.
3. Contributor is legally entitled to grant the above assignment and agrees not to provide
any Contribution that violates any law or breaches any contract.


Thats it.

The FSF also requires copyright assignment from people who contribute code to GNU projects:


Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, there are very substantial procedural advantages to registration of copyright. And despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.

In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer. That way we can be sure that all the code in FSF projects is free code, whose freedom we can most effectively protect, and therefore on which other developers can completely rely.

If this "paperwork" is the issue that drove Raymond to his FSF == 'Cathedral' && "Open Source" == 'bazzar', then he must be having fits now that the community has learned the dangers of ignoring the basics:

Torvalds winged it: Contributors to Linux weren't required to formally assign their copyrights to Torvalds, nor to guarantee the copyrights belonged to them. That let Torvalds build Linux fast and flexible, but it also meant the project was one big handshake deal - fine for a hobby, but not the most sound basis for what would become a $25 billion business.

McBride cited this absence of a paper trail in one of his public letters to the open source community last year, claiming that it resulted in "fundamental structural flaws" in Linux and, indeed, in all open source development. "At a minimum, IP sources should be checked to assure that copyright contributors have the authority to transfer copyrights in the code contributed to open source. This is just basic due diligence that governs every other part of corporate dealings."

Stallman took a different approach with GNU, requiring contributors to sign over their copyrights. "Stallman was right and Linus was wrong," says Free Software Foundation general counsel Eben Moglen. "You need to get the copyright assignments in writing. And you need a form of promise that the rights are theirs to give in the first place. I've got file cabinets of both in my office." It's a tad ironic: In contrast to Stallman's dogmatic approach to free software, Torvalds' ad hoc method is likely what enabled Linux to thrive. Whether Linux would've happened with a paper trail in tow, well, that'll go down alongside other great unanswerable questions, like what would have happened if Apple had freely licensed the Mac OS early on.


Now, SCO has all but lost, but it wasn't because playing fast and loose with the paperwork was an advantage, not in court, anyway. SCO has (all but) lost because they filed a crappy case, with crappy lawyers.

In any case, companies like Red Hat, Novell and Canonical are contributing to Open Office, so the extra paperwork must not cause them grief. Even some linux distributions are now requiring copyright assignment. In fact, back in the eons of time, VA asked for copyright assginements for the code that became SourceForge, but refused to license this work under a Free Software license:

Here is what happened to me shortly before the announcement that
SourceForge would use and develop non-free software. Because I'm
listed as a contributor (in the sources and documentation) to the
SourceForge software, I received a request from VA Linux to assign
copyright to them. I was not surprised or unhappy with this; many
Free Software projects ask contributors to assign copyright of their
changes to the main author. Assigning copyright to a single holder is
a strategy for defending the GNU GPL more effectively, and I would
have been happy to cooperate in that regard.

But when I read the details of their copyright assignment, I saw major
problems. I was asked to assign copyright of my work that "is, or may
in the future be, utilized in the SourceForge collaborative software
development platform". The assignment was not limited to my
contribution to the SourceForge code, it potentially covered all my
past and future work if it was of some interest to SourceForge.

I was also expecting a promise that my work would be released under
the GNU GPL, but the assignment said nothing about Free Software. VA
Linux would be allowed to release the software I wrote under a
non-free software license and not let the community have it at all.
But I wasn't sure at the time if this was a real concern, because VA
Linux only produced and used Free Software. Two weeks later they
decided to introduce non-free software on SourceForge and that cast a
different light on the question.

Lest anyone forget, ESR was the "moral compass" for VA while this was occuring. Raymond's dismissal of projects that require copyright assginment is absurd when placed alongside his fanantical rants that accuse the FSF of being anti-property.

Ramond's writing reminds me of an evolved simian, caged at a zoo, flinging shit at his audience in a desperate attempt to keep himself in the spotlight. Thats all we've got here folks, an ape making noise and flinging his own feces at a world that has grown tired of the spectacle.

It must really burn Raymond that Open Office dot Org uses the LGPL for its license, and that an ever-increasing number of people now understand that Raymond's version of "open source" is darkness, a simple re-branding exercise to make Software Freedom "safe for business".