[ILUG] sun licensing of OpenOffice

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 07:57:05AM +0000 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
John Gill thought:
>  
> > Anyone working on the serious fsf projects, like gcc or other core major
> > projects is usually asked to transfer copyright to the FSF. There are all sorts
> > of solid legal reasons to do this, only copyright holders can sue etc etc, so
> > if someone rips code out of a project with 20 contributers and no clear
> > copyright assignment, only the actual party which wrote the ripped off chunk
> > can sue. 
> 
> If this is the issue, then why not use the Gnome Foundation.  Ie 
> instead of making people sign copywrite over to Sun, let them 
> sign it over to the Gnome Foundation.
> 
> I think people would find that much more palatable.
> 
Not having an opinion on the subject myself, does this not give rise to
difficulties in lawsuits?  

I.e., If Sun own the copyright on *all* of the originally released code
while new additions are copyright Gnome Foundation, what is the status of
an alleged copyright infringement where part of the plagerised code is
copyright to Sun Corp and part to Gnome Foundation?  Can a defendant claim
that the whole bolck of code does not infringe on either copyright since
each is for only part of the code?

0.02c
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)