Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/06/09/16:44:42
On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 02:28:28PM -0400, Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) wrote:
> >>Of course we would be glad to have more people working on the DLL (and
> >>sign the copyright assignment, sigh),
> >
> >Yes, the assignment was/is a hurdle for me. It turns out to be much
> >easier to release something into the public domain (at least at my
> >company), thus my approach. I had actually made some progress with the
> >assignment, but it went back to ground zero when my old group was
> >disbanded.
>
> But releasing something to the public domain doesn't help Cygwin. I did
> ask the Red Hat lawyer if accepting public domain sources was ok and he
> said "Yes, but..." The problem is that you still have to verify that the
> sources are truly public domain and how do you do that without getting a
> disclaimer from a person's employer?
>
> I truly hate all of this assignment stuff that is required for
> contributions to FSF programs and Cygwin. I think it's time for someone
> to come up with an online way to do this. I asked a (very) technically
> savvy lawyer acquaintance about this once and he said "Hmm..." but he
> never came up with anything workable...
FWIW, here's something I proposed to our lawyers that they found
reasonable: paste the fingerprint hash of the digital signature on the
manager's e-mail message approving the copyright assignment into the
assignment form. That way, if there's ever doubt, the message can be
referred to and it could be verified to be the correct message. I don't
know how workable that is, but it could be a start...
Of course, it could be the ravings of a madman on a dark September night,
in which case feel free to ignore or drop a hippo on me (in the
appropriate list).
Igor
--
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