Re: OT: copyright issues (was: Re: D Symbol Demangling)

Baurzhan Ismagulov
2006-04-20T16:39:51Z

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 11:46:30AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > If the patch author has the right assignments, he/she can publish the
> > patch itself under both licenses, so that it can be applied to both.
> >
> > What you can't do is take the fix from the sources themselves and
> > apply it to the other sources, because once they're published under
> > one license you don't have the right to change that license to
> > something else.
>
> Right. The precise situation I was alluding to is that you need to
> track authorship of changes; you can't accept fixes to the other
> version from contributors without an FSF copyright assignment and
> propogate them into GDB.

Great! Just to clarify: A and B are employed by a Company and the
employer has all rights on code they produce. A has an assignment and
contributes code to FSF. This code is also included in a closed-source
product, distributed by the Company in binary-only form. B makes a patch
to the code and wants to propagate it into the FSF copy. B doesn't have
an assignment. IIUC, the above says this patch can't be accepted (I
understand "authorship" as personal, not corporate), even though it's
the Company who had donated code. Does this mean that, in order to have
the patch included, B (and only B, not anyone else from the Company) has
to sign a copyright assignment?

Thanks again,
Baurzhan.