groupware for Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 13:26 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> > > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal
> > > > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
> > > > http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt
> > > 
> > > You can also look at it this way, a country is way easier to control by
> > > a dictator than by some pesky parliament that always disagree with each
> > > other. But still most people would rather not have a dictator in their
> > > country. If people can not agree what to do about a copyright violation
> > > of a common piece of software, maybe that's how it should be, maybe
> > > creating a "dictator" by assigning all copyright to "him" is not always
> > > in the best interest of the community. 
> > 
> > Assigning copyrights doesnt require any dictator (individual) . You can
> > very well assign copyrights to foundations like Apache or organizations
> > like FSF
> Well, then let me emphasize what Alan said before: In Europe, the legal
> situation is not as clear as you seem to be presuming it.

I am not presuming anything in Europe. What I claim only applies to US
as stated in the links I have given above and all my examples have been
US based organizations. 


> 
> Esp. in Germany and probably other (European) countries, copyrights in
> general are not assignable at all [1], which means they probably are
> legally void, a fact which could be legally exploited to fight a license
> at court.
> 
> 
> 
> Ralf
> 
> [1] Germany's constitution explicitly protects copyright on artistic
> work. The question, which AFAICT has not been decided at courts yet, is
> if "free, independent and uncontracted work on OSS above a certain
> amount" qualifies as "free art" and therefore would impose OSS to be
> protected by Germany's constitution. - So far, at least many legal
> publications share and emphasize this view.
> 

Rahul