Re: [Firebird-docs] Copyright

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

Hi Robert,

>> The Foundation neither runs nor owns Firebird, so if already you
>> want to relinquish the copyrights to your work, it should be to the
>> Firebird Project.

> Legally speaking, what is the Firebird project? What does it own?

I suppose the answer to both questions would come close to "nothing".
So perhaps transferring copyrights to the project would be impossible.
And even if not, I don't want to suggest that this would make sense.
But to me it would make even less sense to donate my copyrights to the
Foundation, because the Foundation doesn't write, manage or publish
Firebird docs (or code).

> I thought that copyright on Firebird was with Borland + individual
> contributors, all under the IPL. As we are already restricted to the
> IPL, we can't do anything else other than continue with it.

This is true for Borland code and anything derived from it. But
there's a lot of new code already, and the individual developers have
chosen various OS licenses for their contributed code. There was an
interesting thread about this in Firebird-devel not long ago.

Our documentation is new, so we can choose any OS license there.

BTW, the project summary states MPL as the OS license. I suppose this
is the chosen "default" for fresh contributions. Or perhaps it's just
there because they had to fill in *something*.

> I want to avoid the situation of different pages of the docs being
> copyrighted all over the place. It would be a nightmare if there
> were ever an occasion in future where it mattered.

Well, we don't exactly have dozens of active docwriters. But even if
we had (let's hope we will!) : as long as they all use SF-approved OS
licenses (and they must; that's an SF requirement) it will always
remain possible to keep building on their contributions.

> One really obvious case I can see is publishing the documentation in
> a book. The foundation might want to put the documentation under a
> non-commercial license and then publish, raising money for the
> foundation...

It could do that already now, at least with regard to the OS license
aspect. No need to grant them extra rights. I'm not sure if the
Foundation is allowed to *sell* something for profit though.

> ...without allowing others to publish it for free, but still
> allowing free use on the web etc.

Keeping others from publishing it is impossible with an OS License.
And we can't use anything but OS licenses -- unless we keep our docs
outside of the project.

> An important point I did make above was not to assign code to the
> foundation, but to allow them unrestricted usage.

You're right, I interpreted that too quickly as "giving your
copyrights to the Foundation". Guess I have to think a little slower
sometimes :-)

But I still don't see the benefit in giving the FF unrestricted usage
rights. It just doesn't need them.


Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog