[Samba] Proposal to change Samba contribution copyright policy.

[Dave Daugherty]

After discussing this issue with Adam Au, our VP of engineering our preference is for changes/fixes that require copyrights to assign them to the company, but we are pretty flexible about it and will defer to Samba team's desires.

Dave Daugherty
Centrify


> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-technical-bounces at lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-technical-
> bounces at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Bartlett
> Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 9:02 PM
> To: Jeremy Allison
> 
> On Tue, 2011-07-12 at 14:19 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Some history. Samba has historically only accepted code
> > with personal, not corporate copyright attached.
> >
> > There were a couple of good reasons for this in the past, one
> > of which was that we preferred GPL enforcement decisions
> > to be made by individuals, not by corporations.
> >
> > Under GPLv2, a license violator loses all rights under the
> > license and these have to be reinstated by the copyright
> > holders, which made controlling who those copyright holders
> > were very important. People are usually much more reasonable
> > than corporations :-).
> >
> > With the move to GPLv3, this is much less important than it once
> > was. The GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, allows an automatic reinstatement of
> > rights under the license if a violator cures the license violation
> > problem within 30 days.
> >
> > Given this, I'm proposing that we modify our policy slightly
> > to allow corporate owned copyright within Samba. Note I'm
> > not proposing open season on corporate (C), and we'd still
> > prefer to get individual copyright, or assignment to the
> > Software Freedom Conservancy (as we have done in the past).
> >
> > The reason to prefer individual, or SFC owned copyright is
> > for ease of relicensing components within Samba. Over time,
> > we have moved certain libraries within Samba from GPL to
> > LGPL, for example the tdb and talloc libraries. Re-licensing
> > like this is easier if we don't have to get permission from
> > a corporate legal department, but can just directly ask the
> > engineers themselves, so I'd still suggest that we keep personal
> > or SFC copyright for code that goes into libraries, or code that
> > might be moved into a library.
> >
> > But for things like build fixes for specific platforms,
> > I don't think it's necessary any more to insist on
> > personal copyright, which can delay or prevent engineers
> > from giving us good fixes.
> 
> My main concern is that it will make it harder to explain the line at
> which we require a company that becomes gradually involved in Samba to
> jump though the hoops for individual copyright.  This is typically a
> very tedious process, particularly because of the lack of a standard
> guidance from the Team (because is is typically a modification to
> employment agreements, and because they are both confidential and
> different per company).
> 
> But in exactly the same sense, I personally feel quite bad about
> scaring
> a company off making wiki contributions (about how to do smartcards and
> Samba4) because our policy had no distinction between types of
> contributions.  It would have been really good to have their
> experiences
> in the wiki - and I'm sure the same applies to build fixes and other
> small but important changes.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
> 
> --
> Andrew Bartlett
> http://samba.org/~abartlet/
> Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org