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Re: APB - Copyright assignment


Ãyvind Harboe wrote:
Actually, this case is a bit special. Graham Henderson modified files
that are under eCos (FSF) copyright. I don't know what the legal
status of the files is now, but they are covered by the GPL (with
exceptions, as defined by eCos).


The legal status is that FSF *and* Graham has a copyright claim
to the files. The code was originally copyright to FSF and eCos
license. The fact that Graham has a copyright claim to it is unproblematic
for now.

Actually, that's not true. Graham may not have been entitled to submit such changes. He may not own what he writes - it may well be that his employer does. His employer may include an assignment of intellectual property in his contract. In our line of work, and with the typical background of contributors, this sort of contractual stipulation is common (not universal I know).


This is why the copyright assignment is quite important for eCos - not so much for the assignment itself, but for the accompanying company disclaimer. The fact that the code was published under the eCos GPL is irrelevant - if it wasn't his code to publish, then theoretically the employer can pursue both the FSF and eCos users who possess the driver. Even worse if they have deployed it in a product.

The fact the modifications took place in a GPL'd file does not, unfortunately help. In a hypothetical situation, imagine I stole some code from a company and posted it on the net, with the GPL licence on, or even added on to an existing GPL'd file. The company has not lost its rights to stop (or charge) users using that code because of the actions of someone who was not entitled to post it in the first place.

It's possible there could be some sort of extenuating circumstances where we may be able to be more flexible, but without even being able to contact him, I for one wouldn't be happy.

We have been more flexible when it's part of an established GPL-licence compatible open source project. There are still risks though, and for that matter we have some existing resulting problems there already, such as non-UCB BSD advertising clauses in the BSD stacks. It's not a route to indulge in.

If in the future FSF wants to tinker with the eCos license, then the TSE
becomes a problem, because without Graham's consent(or copyright
assignment), the licensing for his changes can't be changed.

That's correct.


Of course, the best solution is for me to delete the files that were
touched by Graham Henderson and rewrite them. This just got high on my
priority list.


Since the current situation is unproblematic, we can just wait to
see if Graham comes out of the woodwork...

If he comes out of the woodwork, that would definitely be best. Perhaps you could search the niosforum for a new email address?


I don't know if this may be able to lead to anything useful:
http://www.latticesemi.com/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=523&threadid=5302&enterthread=y

(The biggest problem with nios2ecos, IMHO, is that quartus
must be installed to build. This makes it impossible e.g. to put
build tool binaries under version control... I'm not 100% convinced
that uClinux required quartus installed to build...)

AIUI (although I haven't touched nios stuff before thank goodness), versioning would certainly be an issue with Quartus as IIRC they changed hardware configuration formats frequently between versions. Although I guess that as long as a currently supported and available version is used, that may be ok.


Jifl
--
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine

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