Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:05:06 +0000 (GMT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org> Cc: svn-src-head@freebsd.org, jeff@freebsd.org, src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> Subject: Re: svn commit: r187580 - head/tools/sched Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901230948110.66510@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <9bbcef730901221619x390f3daau8104cf8912c4a237@mail.gmail.com> References: <200901220621.n0M6LU5v002745@svn.freebsd.org> <20090122.104114.1927899760.imp@bsdimp.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901221846230.66510@fledge.watson.org> <9bbcef730901221255u5767d16bo230da23542a171d7@mail.gmail.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0901222230430.66510@fledge.watson.org> <9bbcef730901221619x390f3daau8104cf8912c4a237@mail.gmail.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Ivan Voras wrote: > I'm not a lawyer (very obviously - no talent for it all :) ) and was > probably wrongly interpreting the Geneva copyright convention. It's not clear how relevant the Geneva copyright convention is at this point, given that most countries of interest are signatories to the Berne convention. Certainly once the US signed the convention, things got a lot more consistent. One of the interesting things about Circular 92 is how many of the weird clauses in it apply only to things created before the US joined the Berne convention (almost one hundred years after the date of the original convention). > Can someone write a "practical guide to FreeBSD copyright matters for > developers" somewhere - wiki perhaps? (it could also include GPL-related > guidelines - GPLv3 even if there's consensus about it). ORA has quite a nice, if rather US-centric, book on intellectual property and open source. I picked up a copy at EuroBSDCon last year and was favourably impressed. In general, my belief is that open source developers need to pay significant attention to intellectual property, as the "open" in open source is just as important as the "source" bit -- hacking code is easy, making sure everyone can use the result turns out to be a lot harder. Computer scientists often suffer from two or three common misunderstandings of copyright law, certainly: that they understand it, that it can't be understood, and/or that it doesn't matter. There is a committer's guide page on licenses, which basically says "if you use these licenses then you don't need core approval", but I think producing something a bit more substantive would be useful. The Foundation board and the core team have had a number of conversations at various points about formalizing things a bit more, including with the Foundation's legal support, but the obvious questions arise: how to facilitate work on open source without overly constraining it, etc. Robert N M Watson Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?alpine.BSF.2.00.0901230948110.66510>