Re: [AnyC-devel] copyright issues

[Patrick E. <pa...@pa...>]

On Saturday 28 July 2001 02:59, you wrote:
> I have been looking over the code and thinking about this project,
> and something occurred to me:
> The code is probably over 90% finished, and considering that, I
> would like to have sole copyright of the code.  There are a couple
> of reasons for this:
>
> 1. Since I have written most of the code already, I have a lot to
> lose, and not much to gain by incorporating code that I don't hold
> copyright of.
>
> 2. If I ever wanted to dual-lisence the code, it would be
> incredibly complicated if I wasn't the only copyright holder. 
> Other lisences, such as the one used by Qt, would be interesting if
> anyone was ever interested in using AnyC in a commercial software
> product.
>
>   This is not to say will change to a non-GPL license for the
> project.  The main project will stay GPL, but if it ever looked
> promising to extend into a commercial product, I would like to have
> the possibility.
>   The effect of this is that I would like to be the one to make any
> major code additions or changes to the project.  I think the stuff
> you (Patrick) have done so far would fall under the category of
> "minor" changes, which would mean I still hold copyright on all the
> code on sourceforge.  Please let me know if you feel this is wrong!

I can see your point with these issues.  I do not have any problem 
with them.  I'll go so far as to say that for any code I have 
committed, or will commit to the CVS, I assign copyright ownership to 
you.  Because of this, I may choose to leave what I consider to be 
interesting changes outside of the CVS.  They would be incorporated 
as patches or as a forked version, as allowed by the GPL.  That said, 
I'm not anticipating anything interesting very soon, so I imagine 
that won't even be an issue for now.  If I do make some sort of 
interesting change, perhaps we can work something out, where I 
receive recognition for it, and you get copyright ownership on it.  
Anyways, we'll have to jump over those hurdles when and if we come to 
them.  For now, it's all yours, and full speed ahead.

>   By the way, I am working on the documentation, and will update
> CVS and send you a message here when I have a reasonable amount
> done.  I went through most of the code this week, and have a very
> good feel for how the system works. It is fairly close to being
> finished code-wise, but will need a lot of testing and
> documentation after the last bit is finished.

I haven't heard from you since this letter, so I assume you're not 
finished.  I had almost no time on my trip to do anything 
interesting, so I didn't have time to review the AnyC source as I had 
wanted.  Is some of the documentation you're writing an architectural 
overview of the project?  It would be rather helpful for me to see 
the big picture of what's going on in the compiler.

Look forward to hearing from you.  Take care.

        Patrick Earl