On 01/21/2011 09:39 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
Is it remotely valid for them to claim copyright without any formal
copyright assignment documents being exchanged? I suppose this depends
on what "submit" means, but it sure sounds as if they claim that you
hand over your copyright just by being friendly and sending a bugfix to
them.
Is it remotely valid? Man, I don't know. If I had to wager, I'd say that
if you clearly declare your copyright on any contribution and
specifically do not disclaim it, it would trump such a "declaration",
but who knows what a judge would think.
Does this in any way impact the suitability of this package for
Fedora?
As distasteful as it is, I don't think so. They do not require that you
send them anything, they just say that if you do, you're also giving
them copyright. I would much prefer to see them leave this whole
copyright assignment concept out of the source licensing.
I'm going to run this one past RH Legal just to be sure.
The firmware mentioned is given in the form of hex code, which
doesn't
seem to be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to
it." I know the issue of GPL'd binary-only stuff must have come up
before; is there a summary of the issue anywhere I can look at?
I'm not sure that it really has come up before. I would wholeheartedly
agree with you that firmware hex code is not "the preferred form of the
work for making modifications to it", but I'm also not sure whether the
copyright holder (the licensor) or the licensee is the one who
determines what is preferred.
To put it bluntly, you might have to sue them to get the raw firmware
source.
As always, IANAL, this is not legal advice.
~tom
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Fedora Project