Insight and Licencing of TCL/TK Code

[Steven Johnson <sjohnson at sakuraindustries dot com>]

This is a follow on from "The current status of insight'.  It occurs to 
me that there is actually a legal problem with the TCL/TK Sources of 
insight not being assigned to the FSF.

It would seem to me (as i stare at the code, and without checking CVS at 
all).  That there must, over the life of insight, have been a number of 
patches made to the TCL/TK code, from people that are not employees of 
Redhat or Cygnus.  Now those people, if they are contributing anything 
of substance will probably have completed assignments with the FSF (like 
i did ages ago). But they would not have assigned their changes to 
redhat.  So now, there are files, that contain Redhat copyright, that 
have been modified, and those modifications are presumably assigned to 
the FSF, but certainly Redhat can not claim copyright over them.  Yet 
the files as they stand, claim copyright over the entire contents, 
including the contributed parts, that have not been assigned to Redhat.

Isnt this a problem?

Certainly if I were to submit TCL/TK code (which the way im going, im 
about to), i would not be assigning it's copyright to Redhat.

How is this dealt with?  is that really the cruxt of the problem? 

If so, it would seem like there is almost an obligation to "officialy" 
effect the assignment, so that this work of others is properly 
copyrighted, as intended by the various contributors?  Even checking CVS 
wouldnt categorically decide the issue of who owns each patch, as the 
patch may have been applied by an employee of Redhat, but may very well 
of been submitted by an external party.  The only way to unscramble the 
Egg as it were would be to do a trawl of every maintainers email, to 
find the ultimate source of each patch.  A task that is infeasible.

Steven Johnson