[Rd] do developers need to assign rights to someone
Hin-Tak Leung
hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk
Wed Jun 7 19:04:44 CEST 2006
Kevin B. Hendricks wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just in case this is an issue. I freely give all of my patches and
> changes to the R source code to whomever holds or keeps the copyright/
> rights for this project. If it matters I have not signed any FSF
> agreements but I have done so with Sun for OpenOffice.org and would
> be willing to do so for this project.
AFAIK there are only two common reasons for assigning-copying over
(instead of having just a license notice saying somebody can do
as he/she wish with your code as you intended) is
(1) possible copyright infringement is imminent, and the R core team
needs to sue somebody on your behalf
(2) dual-license/commercial licensing - i.e. the R core team want to
relicense R with a different license, then they need to have the
copyright to do that.
situation (1) is rather unlikely for R, but you never know
- historically, the FSF uses that argument to request all changes to
GCC to be signed over, I think.
As for (2), Sun people for obvious reasons want to get you to sign over
copyright, because they want to relicense the openoffice code under
the commericial staroffice license.
I don't think either (1) or (2) applies too closely to R, but then, this
is just my opinion...
HTL
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