On 21/05/16 06:11, Stefan Peter wrote:
> All,
> On 20.05.2016 20:22, David Cramblett wrote:
>> I think it's more the general idea of this situation is common. My
>> employer uses BackupPC as well, and much of my work would be on company
>> time - although I work for a government agency. So not necessarily
>> singling you out, just the situation your in. I think it's a common
>> situation.
> Sorry, but I think there is a misunderstanding here. What I said is,
> under some jurisdictions, a contributor can not transfer his or her
> copyright unless she or he is paid to do the work.
>
> Have a look at the source of the Linux kernel: Vast parts of the code
> are copyright by Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom and so on.
>
> But all of the code is licensed under the GPLv2. And this means that
> those companies have agreed to distribute their code under the rules the
> GPLv2 defines. But this also means that they want to retain the rights
> on their code. They want to be able to sue anyone who takes their code
> and redistributes it under a non compatible license (or even closed
> source). This is the copyrights holders right (and plight).
>
> A rather interesting read is
> http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/how-can-the-linux-kernels-main-c-file-say-that-one-of-its-copyrights-is-all-ri
> for example.
>
> There have been mentions of the infamous SCO trials. But there, the
> situation is different: SCO claims that vast amounts of their code has
> been lifted and transplanted in to the Linux kernel. And such claims can
> be made by anyone, against any project. This is just lawyers having a
> blast and investors gambling.
Right, so the main issue is if the company can state that the employee
wrote this code on company time (or had a contract that says anything
they do while employed even outside of work hours) is owned by the
company, AND that the employee contributed the code without the
employers consent. While this is unlikely, consider the (unlikely) scenario:
Backup Online company uses BackupPC to sell online backup services to
millions of clients
Employee makes some changes to BackupPC to better scale to this level,
or to natively support the MS Backup tool (is that even possible?
doesn't matter).
Employee releases these changes back to the BackupPC project, employer
sues the employee, and claims copyright infringement.
BackupPC project now needs to remove those changes, but even more
problematic, needs to re-write the support, and somehow claim that the
re-write didn't "use" the original code *at all*... eg, a clean room
re-implementation, which is hard (harder to *prove* than a closed source
implementation, where the clean room people never had access to the
source) when the original was available open source...
Now, lets take the really common scenario.
Company sells widgets, and they want to backup their computer systems
They have an employee who sees that it isn't working very well, and so
they write a patch which allows to support the standard MS Backup tool.
Employee releases this patch to BackupPC
Company selling widgets is happy, everyone else is happy, no problem.
> Another issue that may creep up in this regard are patents. I'm quite
> sure that somewhere, some "ingenious" guy has patented "a method to
> backup a computer" or "a method to reduce backup footprints by pooling
> the files/blocks". There is no real defence against this, other than not
> having an entity responsible for the project that could be sued. And if
> it happens regardless, move to project to a country where software
> patents do not exist.
We could also move the project to a country that doesn't support
copyrights.... However, the copyright holder could try to sue each
individual user of backuppc, assuming they could identify suitable "targets"
> I feel that this whole discussion is pointless and a real time sink. All
> the effort going into this discussion would better be spent by working
> on BackupPC and the infrastructure to support it. All I wanted to say is
> that CDAs may not be legally possible for all contributors and that it
> would require some institution which may have to be tightly controlled
> in order to mitigate the risk of loosing the control over the project.
>
> And I'm still not a lawyer.
>
> Therefore, I will refrain from participating in this discussion from now on.
I agree, I think trying to setup any company/charity/whatever legal
structure is a complete waste of time and money (someone has to pay for
it...). We are really only guarding against an employee submitting code
which they are legally not permitted to do. Either way, the project
itself has never done anything wrong (nobody hacked into their system
and knowingly stole the code to contribute, etc)... So, I would strongly
advise that we simply carry on. Allow code submissions from anyone, if
something comes up on the list that makes some code contribution
questionable, then ask the contributor to email the list/issue
tracker/etc to confirm that they have their employers permission.
The rest is simply a waste of time. Let's move on and start discussing
the issues, reviewing and committing the patches already submitted.
IANAL either... in fact, probably none of us are, and I doubt any of us
are going to pay one for actual advice.
Regards,
Adam
--
Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au
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