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Re: Who's maintaining CVS


Jani Monoses wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Sep 2002 03:12:41 +0100 Jonathan Larmour
> <jifl@eCosCentric.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Peter Vandenabeele wrote: [cutting a long story short]
>>> Do I understand correctly that for this special case (lwIP as an
>>> established project distributed by its Copyright holders under
>>> modified-BSD), Copyright Assignment to Red Hat is (as an exception)
>>> not required for inclusion in the main tree ?
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> Any component of the "eCos port" however may be different.
>> Essentially if there is code that _isn't_ already a part of the
>> external project, it should either be contributed to that external
>> project (for which that project takes responsibility) and included in
>> its source base, or be contributed to eCos directly, meaning an
>> assignment (ignoring the disclaimer approach for now).
>>
>> We need the lines of responsibility for code to be clear.
>
>
> So if the ecos specific parts were included in the lwIP project would
> there be no problems?

Assuming it is a natural part of lwIP. It doesn't make any difference to do stuff like add a patch to eCos as a file inside lwIP. Or put a package inside lwIP and say "copy this to your eCos tree" or whatever. Just because it's policy doesn't mean we're stupid about these things ;-P.

> What if I fork lwIP and put all my changes under
> the same copyright? Would that count as an 'established project'?

Now you're really just trying to work around the letter of the policy, rather than the spirit. You could fork eCos instead if you like - it's open source.

> I am
> still trying to find a hassle-free way to make contributions while
> keeping the ecos maintainers happy :)
>
> Is the disclaimer required because the project is hosted on
> sources.redhat.com? If it moved to a non-corporate site would the
> maintainers still require papers? Could companies sue individuals
> developing ecos?

It's nothing to do with Red Hat as such. It's a matter of policy. The more policy gets abused, the more exceptions exist. The more exceptions exist, the more chance there is a weakness in the legal integrity of the code base.

> PS:No,I did not forget that I sent lwIP using the PD get-around months
> ago and frankly I thought it was mostly lack of time on the maintainers
> part to review and include it.I still naively believe that if some code
> has a disclaimer that says 'do anything with me' can legally and
> remorselessly be used by anybody.

Assuming you have the right to do that. Not everyone does.

If this was the FSF, the copyright holders on the most open source code there is[1], there would be no question about it. You must either sign an assignment or sign the aforementioned disclaimer each time otherwise the patches will simply not be used. The FSF have the best legal experience about all this. I intend to follow their example unless there's a good reason.

I agree that assignments are a hassle and a pain and life would be a lot easier if they didn't exist. But they're a necessary evil.

Jifl
[1] I'm pretty sure it beats BSD licensed now.
--
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[ can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln ]-- Opinions==mine


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